Not The Painter

April 23, 2026 — Day 30 Houston Mesa Optional Horse Campground, Tonto National Forest, Payson, AZ — Grand Canyon RV Park, Cameron, AZ The next few paragraphs should sound familiar. In our blog blitz both of us missed that these paragraphs were in the leaving Phoenix blog, they belong here, leaving Payson. So you get to read them twice! It took forever to get out of town. We needed propane and gasoline and the station was the wrong direction from where we wanted to go. After we gassed up the RV and the Jeep we went inside to see about getting propane. We were informed that the propane person was…

April 22, 2026 — Day 29 Houston Mesa Optional Horse Campground, Tonto National Forest, Payson, AZ Paul had been working on the AGS aka Auto Generator Start. He had replaced the “remote” with a lithium battery ready one. We should charge much faster now. The generator worked the previous day. But this morning it would run but not charge the batteries. Weird. He was working with his friend Claude (claude.ai) and various possibilities were investigated. Paul remembered that the generator has breaker. Claude did also. To be fair Claude was first but Paul was doing stuff and not reading Claude’s expert advice. Flipped the switch on the generator and off to…

April 22, 2026 — Day 29 Houston Mesa Optional Horse Campground, Tonto National Forest, Payson, AZ Today we’re going to drive FR300 along the Mogollon Rim. Supposedly there are some pretty good views here. The road will not be technical at all, just a dirt road. For this post it’s a lot of pictures with a little commentary. On the way up to the Rim. More prescribed burns. Later on we could see the smoke from the rim. Two cute buildings in the town of Pine. Now we’re climbing. We never did make it to this ranger station for a stamp. We did pass by it, but neglected to stop in.…

April 20, 2026 — Day 27 Houston Mesa Optional Horse Campground, Tonto National Forest, Payson, AZ Today was to be an adventure. We were going to drive the Pyeatta Draw road, before you start googling nobody knows who Pyeatta was and a Draw is just a narrow rocky ravine. Googling will show you immense wet rocks, like this. SO much can wrong in that picture. This is not the trail we were on. We were on the parallel fire roads which shares the same name that the off-road community calls the Cheater Road. We don’t care, we had fun. But first we had to get there, it was 5 scenic…

April 16, 2026 — Day 23 White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Waddell, AZ We got up early for the sunrise, of course, and no we won’t bore you with the details of yet another glorious sunrise in Arizona. Paul really wanted to get a mountain bike ride in but it was too cold this morning. So we lazed around the RV until the temperature came up a bit. Susan stayed behind because this terrain was more than she’s comfortable with. Of course by the time he got out there it was getting hot! Oh well, he had fun. He saw a Sheriff’s helicopter heading into mountains. “That’s odd.” he thought.…