Goodbye Phoenix
April 17, 2026 — Day 24
White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Waddell, AZ — Houston Mesa, optional Horse, Camp, Payson AZ
Yes, these got out of order… And we missed a lot of things. Like photos. Paul’s excuse is that he’s had horrible insomnia for the last two nights.
We said our goodbyes on the 16th because the 17th was a travel day. We were heading up to Payson to visit a good friend.
Curiously, no photos. Strike that, photos!
How did the savvy travelers prepare for a travel day? They stayed up late playing Playstation, or was it Nintendo Switch, Paul bought Susan one of those, and we had to get an HDMI splitter and stuff.
Time for bed.
It took forever to get out of town. We needed gas and gas was the wrong way from where we wanted to go. But we got it done. We needed propane, but the propane person was out that day. So Susan headed over to the Speedway, which is in the heart of Payson, and much more congested. Paul followed since we planned on hooking up after gas just in case we had to back Clifford up. (You can’t backup while towing a car, not even a few feet.)
We were in radio contact so Susan suggested that he stop by the Payson ranger station for a stamp in our book. That was a quick errand but making that left hand turn, it was taking forever. Paul was about to turn right and find a way to make a Cape Cod left turn, and Susan pops on the radio. “Paul, where are you?” He told her about the left turn. She mentions that since we were going to meet up at Home Depot to plan the day, he might as well turn right, which he did.
We needed to plan since we had some big up and down hills coming, for those days we both drive, un-hooked, but we wanted to find a place to hook up. We found a mall in Flagstaff. Yay, then it was lunchtime.
Phew, we’re off, finally.
The road up to Payson is just as nice as the road down from Payson, but we think this is the first drive we’ve driven North on the road.
Houston Mesa is a gorgeous, place. The spaces are a bit tight, but so heavily wooded you don’t notice. This is the view out our side window.
We played more PS5 in the afternoon, this is Split Fiction, where the back story is that two writers get merged into some magic techno-box and have to escape together, one is a Fantasy writer, one is Science Fiction. We’re still in the open tutorial so we’ve really only seen the SF section. But from the reviews we’ll be seeing both of the side by side eventually. But first we need to walk around this really narrow beam.
That’s not the beam, we’re stuck on the beam, this is pre-beam.
And here’s another shot of the camp site.
The site is pretty sloped at the front, but the back was fine. We’re trying really hard not to use our leveling jacks. We want to remove them to gain 270 pounds of cargo weight we can use for ham radio, knitting and more games!
We had to override the GPS, it wanted to shave a few minutes and drive through Phoenix on “the 10”. We know the hell that is “the 10” in a car and weren’t doing it in the RV towing a car. We chose to take “the 303” around.
Oh, there was another odd thing. We really enjoyed the campground in Payson, plus we like the general area the area and quickly decided to stay for 6 sleeps, not the 2 sleeps we had planned. We had to move camp sites after 2 nights. It was confusing, there’s a long explanation but suffice it to say that the instructions weren’t 100% clear. But the camp host was super helpful! We wound up across the street in the Houston Mesa Horse Camp. You don’t have to have horses in some of the sites. We didn’t have one. What we discovered is that we really like that side of the camp. We’ve either seen some of the campgrounds in Payson or stayed in them. None of them compare to this. It will be our go to spot next time we’re back in town.
This is the trip of Let ‘Er Rip. The No Plans trip. But we’ll need to start making plans. We think we’re going to stay in the northern part of AZ for quite some time. So let’s zoom in the map further for now.
