Surprise!

April 21, 2024 – Day 37

White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Waddell Arizona – Lamplighter RV Resort, Payson Arizona

Today is just a quick travel day from the Phoenix area to Star Valley to visit with our good friend Jay. It was only 123 miles but they’re a difficult 123 miles that we’d driven in the spring of 2023. We knew we’d have to climb back up in altitude on a very twisty and steep mountain roads.

Paul seems to enjoy taking pictures of Clifford on the road. This is Susan on her way out of the campground heading towards the exit. We’ll hook up the Jeep down there since it is wide open and straight.

The town of Surprise has a pretty dumb name. And, there’s nothing funny about death. We spotted this business’ sign and we giggled like loons when we were stopped for a red light right. Surprise, you’re dead! Yeah, dumb joke, we know. But seriously they couldn’t give it another name?

We stopped at a Target to pickup some a couple things we needed. It was supposed to be a quick stop but we soon found out that Bell Road is all the traffic all the time. We won’t make that mistake again. We’d chosen this one because it was close to the campground in Waddell. But as we drove to Payson we saw other ones as we headed north. Oh well, lesson learned: look at all of them to see which is the easiest to navigate. We asked Garmin (we like to call it the “idiot box”) to route us to Payson. The number 1 choice was to head into downtown Phoenix driving the dreaded Route I-10! The speed limit is 65 but the “slow” people go 70-75 and the Indy 500 wannabes are well over 80 mph. We did it with the trailer and it was white knuckle driving all the way. I-10 and an RV and towing the Jeep? That’s a BIG nope.

We choose the second route. We know this is the sane route because it is both shorter in time and distance. And, most importantly, it avoids I-10. You can see why we call it the “idiot box.”

Soon we were onto the twisty and steep Route 87.

It is an insanely beautiful road. It’s hard to believe we’re in the desert with all this green going on!

It is also very steep. There were several stretches that we could only manage 30-35mph. Amusingly, we were still faster than some other big rigs.

We eventually made it into Payson, parked and set up the coach, had showers and headed over to Jay’s house to meet his new dog. Then it was out for a nice Arizona Mexican dinner. Dinners are, apparently supersized in Arizona as are the drink glasses.

Yep Paul wore his Jeep shirt to torment Jay. And Jay wore his Land Rover shirt to torment Paul. It’s all in good fun of course. They both agree that both brands make very capable rigs and that Jeeps were first.

Paul is also please to debut the new “sleep circle” map. He has been working with ChatGPT ever since we left to modify his program to draw those stupid circles. It is finally done! This has been fun for Paul investigating how to use an AI to write code. It also makes a formerly tedious task easy. Each map before this had hand drawn circles, which were just tedious to draw.

We’ll be adventuring some while we’re here in Jay’s town for a few days and then onto CA. We’re not sure when, exactly, we’ll resuming blogging when we leave and let you know by email.

Oh, and click on the map and zoom in if you want, just to see the loop de loop we’re doing. We visiting Anastasia and John first since they had to get out to Brawley CA and didn’t know when that was. Oh, that was today so the timing was perfect.

Daily: 123

Total: 3,369

Driving Miles/Day: 259

Overall Miles/Day: 84 (yes, it plummets when you stay in one place for a week or so)

Life Birds: 1 (Broad-tailed hummingbird at Jay’s very cool solar powered bird bath. We also saw a Lesser Goldfinch, which was a life bird, but still a gorgeous little guy.)