Into Arizona

 Feeling that we have a new lease on our trip, we motor across the New Mexico border toward Arizona and discover the El Malpais National Monument, along NM state road 117, south of I40, one of the two scenic state highways through this rugged landscape.  We noticed several backpackers beside this long stretch of road.  This is an area of previous volcanic activity as parts of the road are lined with chunks of black basalt that we identified and recognized based on our previous experiences in Lava Lands National Park in Bend, Oregon.  Unlike Oregon, in El Malpais huge sandstone rock formations on our left face the open grazing land across the road.

While those are interesting, the El Malpais Monument is not our destination, but Debbie points out that discovering things like this along the way makes our travel fun.  We ultimately head for the town of Show Low, Arizona, and a state park that also has an interesting name: Fool Hollow Lake State Park.  But not before The B!tch --our often untrusty RV navigator-- leads our 61-foot long coach'n'car combination astray one more time.  Following her directions, we turn onto a street that looks definitely neighborhood-like; the roads are narrow, edged with houses, driveways and mailboxes, and each side street is signed Dead End.  With increasing queasiness, we are dumb enough to trust her (although John's brain niggles at him, We didn't see a sign!) until she takes us to the end of that neighborhood on a dead end road, with a lake and RVs visible behind a meadow dead ahead, while proclaiming proudly triumphant, “You Have Arrived!”  The occupants of the ten private residences crowding around us may disagree.  So we unhook the car to allow the RV to back up and maneuver.  John enjoys the newly air conditioned Honda heaven to scout for a wide enough space to turn around.  Google Map on our phones appears to indicate that Garmin missed the entrance by a mile or more.  When we finally arrive there, we plainly see the Park's internal roadway wanders toward those houses on the other side of the meadow, but never connects.

Fool Hollow may have been named for the naïvely trusting Brys, but actually is the moniker applied to the farmer in the last century who insisted that he could prosper in a lowland that flooded seasonally.   His farm may be long gone, but his poor choice remains in the area's name.

The RV park at FH Lake is very nice, with concrete parking pads on well-tended sites, water, electricity, picnic tables, a fire pit and a charcoal grill at each.  Debbie likes our own gas grill.  We want to stay three nights, but our reservations ran into their busy time, so we had to settle for one night in “Red Head 2” (How appropriate! remarks Debbie) then relocate the coach to their “Red Head 26” site. OK, that's doable.  

The reason we appear to be drifting aimlessly is our number one son.  John tells us he's to attend a corporate conference in Nevada along with some others of his company's managers from Alaska.  He has plans to get away one evening to have dinner with us, therefore as we did three years ago in trying to synch our schedule with Debbie's brother Ken, we must be in Las Vegas on May 31^st.  Ah hah!  A goal! Since we're only wandering anyway, we'll circle the Southwest and see things we missed the first time through the area.

We had gone to Show Low in hopes of finding something interesting to do, but the only real attraction at 6,000 feet above sea level is a daily high temperature 20^o cooler than folks have in the low desert of Phoenix.  Of course, we're not from Phoenix, so we did food shopping and Debbie hiked a lot and John a little.  Debbie decides we'll reprise Cave Creek (north of Phoenix) for three days to hit an Amazon Locker (John didn't pack enough shorts!)  Afterward, we expect to spend several gorgeous sightseeing days based in Cottonwood next Friday at another cutely named Arizona state park.

For now, we fire up the computer to start writing this blog series and drive around the town on this weekend, reading every word in the local brochures to learn that Show Low was named for a guy in 1876 who won the property from another man, neither of whom could stand to be near each other. Near apparently was measured by many, many miles.  They resolved their interpersonal conflict by cutting a deck of cards → low card would stay in the area.  The winner turned up the lowest card possible and took possession of a huge farm which, over time, became an even huger farm –at one point half a million acres more huge.  The town took the Show Low name, then called its main thoroughfare  

“Deuce of Clubs.”  It's true.  We have proof:

However, the 13th day of our trip is not a lucky one for us.  On May 8th, we arrive in Cave Creek, several miles north of Phoenix.  We'd been here before and have the highlighted memory of that trip three years ago – May 2019.  This time the “alien scenery” we anticipated so much was not as alien, although the saguaro cacti are a welcome sight.  Our newest Adventure wrinkle, however, is the starter system in the RV.  Sometimes it works; at one point we needed to try to half-a-frustrated-hour before the engine turned over.

There is a Freightliner facility in a Phoenix suburb, on the southwest side of town.  We're somewhat north and east and would much rather have stayed in this very nicely appointed state park RV camp (see that link above for the spacious “camp” ground description). After the first night, we relocated to the Freightliner parking lot while they diagnosed the problem and scheduled repair for the next morning. In a nineteen year old vehicle from Michigan, problems appear in the darnedest places, this time in corroded cable ends where the starter draws its power from the “chassis batteries.” It's a relatively simple fix, although inconvenient, but it allows John to breakfast at a Waffle House for the first time in what had to be more than forty years and the two of us to wander the land south of Phoenix.

There we find the desert being consumed by invading new subdivisions, which led to the need for signs reminding us all that there's a water shortage. That doesn't seem to have stopped the seemingly irrational desire of people who insist on living in that dry environment to mist their patios to keep their skins supple. We had mentioned in a previous trip how the Colorado River used to run to the sea. Our understanding has been enhanced on this trip. The Colorado River's remains trickle into several small streams that evaporate somewhere in Mexico.  NationalGeographic.com reports the River “peters out of existence miles short of the sea.”

Our waiting-on-the-repairs wandering takes us into a parkland.  That word means acres of green grass to us, of course, but there's nothing like that in the 20,000 acres of the Estrella Mountain Regional Park, in Goodyear, AZ, south of Phoenix.  We pay 7-bucks for a windshield tour, hoping to get the phone call from Freightliner and, indeed, that comes after short time in Estrella's visitor center cum museum. However, not before we meet a real live diamond-back rattlesnake in a glass display case.  Then we see a real live mama quail defend her brood from a real live roadrunner (which doesn't look too terribly much like the WB cartoon version of our childhoods) and none of them are restrained behind glass.  We also meet a man who relocated to Arizona from the Muskegon area.  While he reminisces about Michigan, he obviously doesn't miss the winters.

We take the RV from the shop, leaving several dollars behind, and head back to Cave Creek for one more night among the cacti and desert flowers.  Other than a visit to the Care Free Botanical Gardens for Debbie, there's not much else of interest here. 

Reviewing her notes from No Rain, whom we met in Oklahoma as you recall, Debbie has us booked into another Arizona Park in Cottonwood. There's a train ride through red rock valleys involved. Also a Wild West dinner and show. And a ghost town. Whoo...