Wednesday I did a little preparation for our departure from Usery Mountain Regional Park. We would have liked to stay, but the park is booked up. In the afternoon, Donna and I rode the scooter to the Wind Cave trailhead, about a mile and a quarter from our site.

The Wind Cave trail winds its way from the southeast up Pass Mountain. The trail takes you out of Usery Mountain Regional Park into the Tonto National Forest. The trail starts with a gradual climb but quickly steepens. It’s rocky and footing can be precarious in places.

I was suffering from pollen allergies. A little past the halfway point, I told Donna I wasn’t going to climb the rest of the trail. She wanted to continue, so we agreed to meet back at the trailhead. I took my time coming down and shot a few photos. Donna trekked up at a fast pace, then ran back down the trail. She made the round trip in about an hour.

The vista from the trail is awesome. The atmosphere was hazy so I couldn’t get a good photo of the valley and downtown Phoenix, but I did get a shot of Buckhorn Campground.

On the way back to our site, I stopped and took a picture of the Superstition Mountains off to the east.

Wednesday night, Donna put her new Health Craft induction cookware to good use.

She made baked shrimp with fennel and feta with brown basmati rice. It was delicious. The induction cooktop brought a cup of rice in two cups of water to a boil in no time at all and cooked to perfection.

 

Yesterday we packed up and hit the road before 11am. In aviation they use the term “near miss” to describe a close encounter such as two airplanes passing close to each other in flight. Seems like an odd term to me, it’s more like a near hit than a miss.

We had three near misses after we left the park. We drove down Ellsworth to fuel up at the Chevron station at Brown Road. Our timing was bad – the station was extremely busy. There was a Newmar Essex motorhome at the pump I wanted to pull up to. There was a delivery truck  in the lot and a couple of other trucks at the pumps. I waited for about five minutes. The motorhome at the pumps didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon. Pumping 100 gallons at a low-volume pump (opposed to a high-volume truck stop pump) can take 15 minutes or more.

I decided to pull out and go to the Shell station at Main Street. I knew it had an easy entrance and exit. As we pulled onto Main Street, there was a loud crashing sound in the coach. I asked Donna what happened. She said our new induction cooktop just slid off of the counter! Oh no!

It turned out to be a near miss – the cooktop landed on top of our shoes by the entry door, cushioning the fall. It was undamaged.

After we fueled up, we drove to Apache Wells RV Resort where we’ve booked a 15-day stay. On the way, Donna realized her water bottle had tipped over on the tray in front of her and was leaking and her laptop was getting wet. As I turned onto 56th Street, the tray her open laptop was sitting on slid into the dashboard and the screen went dark. We would have to deal with it later.

We found our site in the RV park and dropped the trailer. Donna did an excellent job of guiding me with our handheld Cobra CB Radio*. It was tight, but we managed. Our 40-foot length is the maximum this park can accommodate. She had me perfectly positioned next to a concrete pad that will be our porch.

We started setting up. Donna asked me if she should have the door steps out and I said yes. Then I dumped the air from the suspension. As the coach lowered, we heard a loud metallic clang. What now? As I stepped out of the coach, I saw what happened. The concrete pad is slightly higher than the gravel lot we’re parked in. When I dumped the air and the coach lowered, the steps hit the concrete. The weight of the coach was resting on our door steps!

I put blocks under our jack pads and raised the coach. I tried to retract the door step. No go. I got out and looked. I hadn’t raised the coach enough, the steps were still contacting the concrete. I raised the coach another inch or two and leveled it. I tried to retract the steps again and they worked fine. No damage – another near miss.

After I finished hooking up, I dumped our holding tanks. We had gone 15 days without dumping! I think they were nearly full. I now know the sensors aren’t working, as they showed less than half full. The black tank took three minutes to drain through three inch pipe. The two inch drain on the gray tank took five minutes! That’s a lot of liquid.

After I finished, Donna told me some bad news. Her laptop was dead. It wouldn’t boot up and clearly was not charging. She was pretty unhappy as she had a lot of work saved on her new laptop that had yet to be backed up. She was talking about going to Best Buy and getting the Geek Squad to look at it and see if they could save her hard drive.

I suggested waiting. I thought the water that spilled on it may have caused a temporary short circuit. I once fell into our swimming pool with a cell phone in my pocket. The cell phone quit working. A day later, it dried out and worked fine. Donna put her open laptop on a rack to allow air to circulate around it.

We walked to the park office and asked them to deliver a trash can for our site. We looked around at the pool and exercise room. We both found books to read in the park recreation room. While we were out, we ran into Mark and Emily Fagan! They stopped by to see our new digs.

There are many orange trees in the park. They pick the fruit and bag it near the office. The bags of oranges are free! We brought some oranges back to our site.

In the late afternoon hummingbirds gave us a show. They were feeding and perching in the orange tree next to our windshield. We enjoyed watching them.

Late last night, Donna tried her laptop and it fired up! Near miss number three!

Today, I’ll explore the park. I also need to install a new door check assembly on our entry door. The new part finally arrived yesterday. The old one was broken when we took delivery and the dealer had a new one on order. Meanwhile, we’ve had to prop the door if we wanted it to stay open.

 

*Just so you know, if you decide to purchase one of these through the Amazon link in this post, I’ll earn a small commission. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!