Week 1

So a week has passed already? Wow.

We kind of started full timing “accidentally”. I mean we had planned to sell the house and move out in an orderly manner with friends taking furniture etc. as pre-arranged. Then Salvation Army would be taking the rest as the house closed. Finally we would move to a local RV Park for a day while the formalities went thru and we would depart gracefully to the sound of trumpets and the cheers of the crowd.

In our dreams that is!

The actuality was that the house was supposed to close on the 27^th so we called our friends who took what they wanted, then we called Salvation Army who could only come on the Thursday before. So we would have too live in the RV in the drive as the bed would be gone between Thursday and Monday. But then they said they couldn’t take all the furniture as some was “Stained” so we made arrangements for that to go.

 We talked to the escrow company and they said we could do the closing from the road so we left Friday afternoon intending on staying at the Escapees RV park in Yuma.

The park was closed for the summer! (It gets over 100F every day in the summer and Yuma is a big wintertime “Snowbirds” winter resort area). We finally found a park that was open and stayed there for the night.

Saturday we headed north aiming for the Escapees North Ranch park in Wickenburg AZ (after checking it was open). We checked in for 3 nights figuring we would be there for the closing on Monday seeing that we had a reasonable phone and internet connection there.

We had fun exploring Prescott (20 degrees cooler than Wickenburg due to altitude) and meeting the nice people who spend the entire year in the park. 

Monday came and went with no closing due to the buyer’s lender being late with their paperwork. It spun out to Wednesday when it seemed that things were finally approved. Then we decided to head north.

We met some folks at the park who were headed up to Rapid City about the same time as we were and gave them our details so we would hook up again up there. We headed up SR8 thru Prescott and climbed and climbed up to 7000 feet in Flagstaff AZ where on arrival the temperature was almost HALF what it was in Wickenburg! 57 degrees verse 101.

We found a national forest campground in Coconino Forest called Pine Crest that was dry camping but very nice at only $11 a night with our senior National Parks card.

Along the way our realtor told us that the buyer’s financing had come thru at last.

It got darned cold up there the first night, we had a blanket on the bed again and all the windows closed to keep in the heat. Running on batteries and propane wasn’t a problem and we’d emptied the black and gray tanks before leaving North Ranch. We carry a half tank off water with us as a matter of course so we were all set.

Time for bed, but when we got in the mattress was rock hard! What the heck? We have a Sleep Comfort mattress, kind of glorified air mattress. We had come from basically sea level in San Diego to 7000 feet in Flagstaff. The difference in atmospheric pressure made the mattress seem rock hard. But when we tried the remote control we got an “Error” message. We diagnosed a dead battery in the remote but after changing it we discovered that the pump for the mattress has to have 110v to work and we were working on 12V. 

Live and learn.