Concho

Wednesday I had an appointment at A-1 RV Service Center in Camp  Verde. I dropped the camper off and then went to PetSmart in Sedona to get some food for Roxie, and some other small errands. I had to pick up my lawn chair from Donna, as I’d left it at the rally site. They had my camper all done by 1:00 and everything now works! They said the fridge propane orifice was filled with bits of rust. That makes me soooo mad, as I paid a highly recommended RV guy in Asheville $75 to clean the propane fridge system just 3 months ago. If he’d done the job right, there would not be a buildup of rusty junk now! At any rate, the fridge works just fine now.  They also fixed the camper brakes; the wires to the magnet on one side were completely torn in half! I have NO idea how that could happen. They checked the frame welds, rotated the tires and checked out the Fantastic Vent, which had suddenly started running slow and was obviously hitting on something. Guess what….there was a dead bumblebee and a beetle in there, and the blades were hitting on them! Crazy.

So $250 later I headed to Holbrook and met up with Deb again at Petrified Forest National Park. There’s no camping inside the park but at the south end there’s free camping at Crystal Forest Gift Shop, which provides covered picnic tables and use of their dumpster, plus the restroom while the shop is open. Across the road is Petrified Forest Museum, where you can get a campsite with picnic table and electricity (no water) for $11 a night. Deb stayed on the electric side and I was at the free side. The winds were around 25 mph with gusts up to 40 so I was careful to park heading into the wind and stayed hooked up to the car for more stability, and there was surprisingly not much buffeting. Apparently the winds seldom calm down around there! The gift shop guy said they get a few good days. We decided to skip going through the park, as we’d both done it before. We went into Holbrook and had breakfast at Joe & Aggie’s Cafe on Rt. 66. It’s been in existence since 1943 and is a little run-down but the breakfast was really good!

Then we headed to Concho to check out my new property & see if I could get my camper onto it. I was embarrassed that we had to go right back past where we’d camped….a 40 mile round trip for breakfast! And we didn’t really have to haul the campers to town and back, either. Oops. We are camped at Concho Lake Park which is a pretty nice boondocking site with a porta-john and garbage cans, with sites all over in the pinon trees. Still very windy here too so the trees help block the breeze. I guess it’s Open Range here as we have to watch out for giant cow flops. I rearranged my passenger seat and moved some of the bigger rocks so Deb could fit in, and we drove out to the property.

Along the way we met up with some of the “neighbors” from about 3 miles away I think. They were on our tail the whole way so I pulled over to let them by, but they didn’t want to get past, they wanted to know what we were doing out there. They had just had their 8×8 wooden storage building stolen a few days ago!! So we got an earful about the area, and none of it sounded good. Lots of theft unless you stay on your property 24/7 to guard everything, the nearest neighbor is a drunk who steals things, the police don’t come out there. And the guy in that car had wild-looking eyes; Deb thought he was high on something, either meth or cocaine!  Apparently the wind blows pretty constantly there too. They said there was about two months in summer when the winds die down. Once we got to the property and walked around, it looked like there was really nowhere quite level to put the camper and it would require some bulldozing to make a level pad for the camper and for my future larger camper.  And it was very very windy, just like the first time I was there.

I decided perhaps this was not the place for me. I was not happy to hear it was an area where people would steal something as large as a storage shed, and I don’t think I could live with that constant wind.  So I’m not buying it after all. The seller was very gracious about it and of course I forfeited the two $77 payments I already had made but that’s OK, I think I dodged a bullet. Gee, I never knew there were places that had constant high winds like that!

So I’m “homeless” again. And very sad about it. I wanted to have a garden, and a home for my rocks. I probably picked up an additional 50# of rocks when I was in Superior, thinking I’d be dumping them off on the property! And I love them and don’t want to jettison them.  I was so looking forward to eventually getting a larger camper to live in. Oh well. I will continue to try and save money in case another promising homesite comes along. The problem is that Apache County is one of the few in AZ that allows you to live in a camper. And I think all of Apache County is also a huge wind tunnel! There are also not that many places in AZ that don’t have those really high sumertime temps. Flagstaff is great in summer but has a really harsh winter…..Prescott has perfect weather but property is quite pricey.  Somewhere out there is a home for us, I just know it!