Willie Nelson's got nothing on us

April 26, 2007
Flagstaff, AZ

On the road again...

Well, departure day finally came and we're off! We had our final packing and shutdown tasks to do today, and we hit the road slightly earlier than planned.

In the morning, I finished up a bunch of house stuff and packed the car. The Range Rover is now officially our "garage" where all the excess stuff goes. In the back we have our two "big ass recliners" for relaxation, a large storage tub with coach/car cleaning supplies, our old inverter which has been sold to a fellow Monacoer (Fred Hengel) who's in New Jersey less than 10 miles from where we used to live, my mountain bike, the 12v cooler, and a battery booster, just in case. Once the car was packed and most of the remaining coach stuff was staged in the kitchen or garage, I took off to retrieve the coach from it's parking spot. After a quick stop for fuel to top off the tank, I was back home by 10:30 or so.

When I arrived, Geri had the freezer already staged for me to carry out. While she filled to coach freezer, I moved the rest of the staged stuff to the coach, then we tackled the refrigerator. Mary Ann (neighbor) stopped by and helped out a lot. In the meantime, I started draining the hot water heater (had never been flushed). Who knew that would take over 3 hours?

By about 1:00, we were pretty much ready to go. We spent a few minutes saying our "so longs" to Mary Ann, Clisby (across the street) and Karen (next door) and, after a couple of checks to make sure we had everything, off we went.

Merlin and Maya Lynn were so good today; they really are good traveling dogs. They hung out in the coach while we loaded, and didn't fuss at all. They "knew" we had things to do, and the also knew that we weren't going to leave them behind, so it was all good.

We left about 1:15 PM, about 45 minutes earlier than planned. Today's route was simple: Loop 101 to I-17 north to I-40 east. A couple of minutes after we hit I'40, around 3:45, we were at our destination: Black Bart's Steakhouse and RV Park. Like I could pass up a 32 oz. porterhouse. Yeah, right. The only trepidation I had was that the wait staff is the entertainment, mostly singing show tunes. Actually several of them were quite talented. We figured that Sandy would know which shows the songs were from (none jumped out at us). Most of them are music and/or theater majors at NAU (Northern Arizona University) here in Flagstaff. This reminded us that we forgot to ask Wendell what his son attending NAU is concentrating on.

Today's travel was generally uneventful. Similar to Dave's bicycle ride, we climbed from 1,200 feet in Peoria (Phoenix) to 7,000+ feet near Flagstaff. The only difference is that we're propelled by the 515 hp Detroit Diesel! The only "incident" we had was some road debris (looked almost like a piece of a metal step-stool) that we couldn't avoid in the middle of our lane. It caught on the electrical cord for the tow lights on the Range Rover and broke the metal housing for the plug. It didn't cut the wire or even break the connection, but did leave part of the plug dragging on the ground for a short while. Fortunately, I had a replacement plug I'd picked up in Oregon, so I spent 1/2 hour reconfiguring the wires after we arrived. I'd been meaning to clean up the wires and cables on the tow bar anyway, so today was as good a time as any!

Tomorrow, we're off to Albuquerque, a short 6-hour day.

It's time for CSI, so that's it for today...