The Center of Arizona

Hello again friends, welcome back to our travels. Our last episode concluded with our arrival on Tuesday, November 2nd at the Western Horizons park in Casa Grande, Arizona. Since we are going to be at this park for two weeks, we had a lot of stuff to set up and it took most of the afternoon. As a result, we stayed at the coach for the entire day.

Wednesday, November 3rd, we went out after lunch to the movies. This time we went to see “Social Network”, the movie that chronicles the start of Facebook. Since I just recently started using Facebook myself, I thought this would be an interesting movie. The movie was quite good, with few well known stars, and told a very interesting story of a super techno-nerd with zero social skills dealing with the real world of money, power and the legal system. After the movie we stopped by the local Best Buy to look at computers. My desktop system, the one in my office in the back of the coach, has died and I am looking to get a replacement. Right now I am using our old Dell laptop that we normally use for navigation and systems monitoring when driving the coach. After a little window shopping we headed back to the coach for the rest of the day.

Thursday we met our friends Ken and Bonnie Woepke for lunch at a place in Casa Grande called Tom’s BBQ. Ken and Bonnie are also full timers and we frequently cross paths with them in the winters when we are both in the Southwest part of the country. We had last seen Ken up in Pahrump back in September, but Bonnie had gone out of town, so we really didn’t have much of a visit. Last year they bought into a lot at the Escapee’s co-op park here in Casa Grande, so they will be spending a lot more time here. The BBQ was pretty good and the visit was great. We had a good time catching up and talking about our travel adventures. We also talked a bit about our friends Bob and Bette Thomas. Regular readers may recall that Bob and Bette were the Secretary and Treasurer of the 100%ers Chapter of FMCA, of which I was the President. We had last seen Bob and Bette at the Western Horizons park in Pahrump as well. Shortly after we left Pahrump Bette had a stroke and was in the hospital for several weeks. She is now doing better and is in a rehab facility in Pahrump. After lunch we went back to the RV park and did our laundry and spent the rest of the day at the coach.

Friday we decided to have a stay at home day. Got a few small chores done around the coach and just relaxed for the most part. I did try to line up a mobile repair service to come out and fix our slide topper awnings. The thread on the edges has deteriorated and they need to be taken down and resewn. One of the living room toppers has actually come loose from the coach and I fear it may tear worse than it already is unless I get it fixed soon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get anyone that had the time and the resources to come out before we left here. I’ll have to try again in Yuma when we get there.

Saturday, November 6th we left the coach about 10:30 a.m. and headed North on I-10 to the Southeastern part of the Valley of the Sun, as the metropolitan Phoenix area is known, to do some geocaching. We were headed to the cities of Chandler and Gilbert. These two cities were among the top ten fastest growing cities in the nation for several years back in the nineties. I recall from back in my Sheriff’s Office days in the 70's when both towns were about two square miles in size and basically farming communities. Now they are huge bedroom communities for the Phoenix area. Chandler is only about 30 miles North of Casa Grande, so it was an easy drive.

Our first stop was lunch at Joe’s Farm Grill in Gilbert, Arizona. This restaurant was featured on an episode of the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” with Guy Fieri. Regular readers will remember that we are big fans of that show and try to find “Triple D” places to eat as we travel around the country. Joe’s is an
interesting place. The restaurant is the family’s 1960's vintage home which was converted into a restaurant that has a distinctly 60's drive-in look. One must go up to a window and order the food, then pick up the order at another window. There is quite a bit of indoor seating, but the real charm of the place is the large grass picnic area in the back. It is shaded with huge old Tamarisk trees with picnic tables scattered about. We ate out there because the weather was perfect. Joe’s has a large, eclectic menu, and they use a lot of ingredients grown right on the family’s own farm. I had the Ahi Tuna sandwich, which was phenomenal.
Jackie had their special grilled pizza, which she said was equally good. Since it had bleu cheese on it, which I despise, I didn’t try it. We also had the onion rings that Fieri had raved about and found them to be excellent as well. All in all, an excellent place to eat and enjoy a casual lunch or dinner, especially when the weather is nice. We would highly recommend this place, located at 3000 East Ray Road, Gilbert, Arizona. Here is a link to their web site. www.joesfarmgrill.com. Check it out.

After lunch we did some geocaching in the area, mostly in the city of Chandler. One of the caches required us to visit the Chandler City Museum which we found to be very interesting. The city can trace its roots back to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber company in the 1920's which had thousands of acres of cotton on company farms. The company also had thousands of acres of cotton farms on the far Western part of the Valley which was responsible for the present town of Goodyear, Arizona. Goodyear Tire required the cotton for their tires in order to supply the emerging automobile market and found Arizona to be the ideal place to grow cotton. At that time cotton was used in the internal belts of an auto tire. One can still find remnants of the old company buildings and labor camps around the far Western valley. Chandler has expanded so much it has obliterated most of its farming heritage.

During our caching in the area we managed to score a dozen finds. After caching we headed over to the local Costco to stock up on our Absolute vodka. Hard to find a cheaper place to buy booze. We then headed back to Casa Grande for the rest of the day.

Sunday, November 7th, we got ready early to prepare for the arrival of my brother Ken and his wife Susan. Ken and Susan live in Goodyear, Arizona, which is only about a 90 minute drive from Casa Grande. We had talked to them earlier in the week about meeting them somewhere, and they said they would like to drive down to Casa Grande to see us and do some caching. We had introduced them to geocaching less than a year ago and they have become big fans of the hobby. They just went over 1,000 finds, a great first year! We have been doing this two and a half years and are just now approaching the 2,000 find mark. If Ken and Susan keep up at their current pace they will be passing us soon.

They arrived at the coach at 10:00 a.m. and after some catch-up conversation we headed out to start our caching day. Because we have been to Casa Grande several times since we started caching, we have pretty much exhausted the caches right around town. However, Ken and Susan had never been here, so we worked off of their list. This meant that we were going to some caches that we had already visited. There were a number of them where I recognized the name of the cache, and even remembered the area, but I didn’t remember exactly where the cache was or what it looked like. There were also a couple that I remembered clearly, so I let Ken and Susan take the lead in finding those.

After finding a couple of caches we stopped for lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, Eva’s Cantina. We make an effort to eat there at least once each time we visit Casa Grande. It is located on Pinal Road, just a mile or so South of the
Western Horizons park. Ken and Susan also loved the food and we all overate a little. After lunch we went back out to cache and didn’t quit until just after 4:00 p.m. Our little four person team managed to get 20 finds for the day, including two that were rated as a 4.0 difficulty, which is pretty hard. The max difficulty is 5.0 and we normally don’t look for many over a 2.0 rating. The 20 finds was just one short of our all time daily record of 21 and the best part is we had no DNF’s, caches we looked for but couldn’t find. Yippee!!

After caching we came back to the coach and sat around and talked until about 7:30 when Ken and Susan left to head for home. We had suggested they spend the night, but they had stuff to do on Monday and wanted to get an early start. We had a wonderful day with Ken and Susan. We enjoy their company and love to have them visit. We talked about having them come over later this winter when we are in the Indio area.

Monday, November 8th, we decided to just stay home for the day. I got some little maintenance and repair tasks done, but we mostly just chilled. Tuesday morning we went over to Palm Valley RV Resort for their crafts fair. Palm Valley is a very nice resort where we stayed a few years back for a month. We had gotten a great deal on a coupon from one of the rallies we attended that year that let us stay there for $200 for the month, about 25% of the normal rate. We did some shopping there, bought some new sheets for the bed and a couple of little items. After the crafts fair we went to Denny’s for lunch and then did our grocery shopping at Walmart and Frys. That was the extent of our activities for the day. Tuesday we just stayed in for the whole day.

Wednesday, November 10th - Happy 235th Birthday United States Marine Corps! We went out after lunch to do some local geocaching. We started our looking at a nice local desert park, North Mountain Park, about five miles Northeast of Casa Grande. The park has great desert views, good gravel roads and nice ramadas, but it is kind of remote. There was only one other vehicle in the park when we were there. There was a cluster of caches in the park, so our first six caches were all inside the park boundaries. We then went South and found a couple, including one in the parking lot of the outlet mall on I-10. This mall is just about closed up, there were only about eight stores still open, and most of those were having closing sales. Once big new shopping mall a mile North was opened, the outlet mall started to go under. We hit a couple of the stores that were still open, but didn’t get anything.

After the outlet mall we went up to the Best Buy store to check and see if they had any computers on sale, or any computers to match the value of the one that I had seen in Walmart on Monday. They did not, so we then went over to Walmart and bought the Acer computer they had. It is a great computer with an Intel processor, 6 GB of RAM, a huge 1 TB hard drive and built in WiFi. I was all excited to get home and start getting it set up. I spent the rest of the day, and most of the evening, getting the computer set up and installing all my software. New computer - Yea!

Thursday, November 11th - Veteran’s Day - thanks to all who served! We went out for lunch to Eva’s Mexican restaurant again, this time to meet Ken and Bonnie Woepke. We had a very nice lunch and a couple hours of nice conversation. We probably won’t cross paths with Ken and Bonnie again until January in Quartzsite. After lunch we went back to the coach so I could finish work on my new computer.

Friday we went out after lunch to the movies. We saw “Unstoppable” with Denzel Washington. This was opening day for this film and it has been a while since we saw a movie on it’s opening day. This was a great action movie about a runaway freight train in Pennsylvania. It was based on a true story from back in 2001. I would give this movie four out of five stars. The biggest filming flaw was that although the plot had the runaway traveling at 60 to 70 MPH, in some of the scenes it appeared to be moving more like 20 MPH. After the movie we went to Penny’s in the same mall, but didn’t end up getting anything. We spent the rest of the evening at the coach.

Saturday, November 13th we left after lunch and drove up to Chandler again to do some more caching. For those places that we visit fairly often, like Casa Grande, we have to venture further afield to find caches that we haven’t found before. We were able to find seven caches for the afternoon, but horror of horrors - we had not one, but TWO DNF’s! We have not had a cache we couldn’t find for several months, and then in one day we have two. Eek. After caching we made a quick stop at the Chandler Sam’s Club for some things we needed and then headed back to Casa Grande for the rest of the night.

Sunday was a quiet day around the coach. Jackie made up a batch of her wonderful Halibut chowder for Monday. She always likes it to set up for one day before we eat it. Looking forward to it.

Monday, November 15th was a chores day getting ready for our departure from Casa Grande on Tuesday. I spent a couple hours putting stuff away outside and then we went and did our laundry. We had the Halibut chowder for dinner and it was wonderful.

Tuesday, November 16th we left Casa Grande about 9:30 a.m. and headed West on Interstate 8 on a 200 mile journey to Winterhaven, California and the Pilot Knob RV Resort. Regular readers of our travel blog may recall that Winterhaven is jus
t across the state line from Yuma, Arizona. Although we are in California, this little corner of the state stays on Arizona time, which at this time is Mountain Standard time. We are planning on being here for two weeks. During this time we will visit Algadones, Sonora, Mexico to get some dental work done and I need new glasses.

With our arrival in Winterhaven I will close this chapter of the blog. I will publish again in a couple of weeks. Until our next chapter, stay safe and be happy.

A Week In Tucson, Arizona

Welcome back friends. The last chapter concluded on October 26th, upon our arrival just South of Tucson at the Cactus Country RV Park. Once we got set up we made a quick run into Tucson to Costco for supplies. OK, mostly vodka, but we did buy pretzels and olives too! After that we just stayed in for the rest of the day.

Wednesday, October 27th we were up at 5:00 a.m. and had the coach on the road by 6:40 a.m. headed to the shop in Tucson. As I said in a previous post, I had discovered that we had an exhaust leak on the coach engine and we needed to get it fixed. Our friend Ray Babcock had recommended a diesel shop in Tucson called W. W. Williams so that’s where we took it. We arrived there about 7:30 a.m. and checked in with our service writer, Saul. I have to say that Ray was correct when he told me that Williams had a very nice, clean shop. It was very big, is part of a national system with shops all over the country, and they were very helpful. He did a quick visual confirmation of my diagnosis of a blown exhaust manifold gasket, contacted our extended warranty company, and got the coach into the shop to start work. By 11:00 a.m. they had the manifold off and determined that the manifold itself was warped and also needed to be replaced. We were worried for a while that we would have to wait for parts and end up in a motel for the night. However, the parts guy was able to locate a manifold locally and Saul said we should still be done by the end of the day. Once we knew the parts were available and the warranty company had authorized the repairs, we headed out to get lunch and do some caching.

We had lunch at a place called My Big Fat Greek Restaurant. We had eaten here the last time we were in Tucson in the Spring and enjoyed it very much. Jackie loves Greek food, especially the lamb dishes like the Gyro. She had a Gyro and I had a steak and cheese wrap that was delicious. We can highly recommend this place, which is located on Broadway and Kolb in Tucson. After lunch we made a quick stop at an upholstery shop to drop off one of our window shade screens from the coach. The sun had deteriorated the stitching holding the border trim on the screen and I wanted to get it fixed. They told us it would be a couple hours, so we went caching. We were able to find five in about an hour and a half. Although it was urban caching, several of the caches were in places where it was hard to park and it took us a while to get from cache to cache. We also made a stop at the Tucson Mall to visit Penny’s just to check the sale racks. I ended up with a couple of real bargains in tee shirts and shorts.

We then picked up our repaired screen, which only cost us $15, and headed back to the shop to check on the coach. We got there at 4:00 p.m., which was when Saul told us to come back, and the coach was finished. The total bill was almost $1,000, but they managed to get it done in one day. Yea! Unfortunately, it was after business hours for the warranty company, so we couldn’t get them to pay their portion of the bill. Williams couldn’t let us leave without payment so we had two choices, we could spend the night in their parking lot, where they did have 50 amp electric, or we could write them a check for the full amount of the bill. Fortunately, Saul worked with us again and told us that he would hold the check and the paperwork until the morning when we could come back (in the car this time) and finish the transaction with the warranty company. We will have to pay our $500 deductible and the warranty company will pay Williams the rest. With that we drove the coach back to the RV park and got set up again, this time for the rest of the week.

Thursday, October 28th we had planned to go to a movie after lunch, but we needed to wait for Saul to call to let us know that Good Sam had paid Williams their portion of the bill. Once they got paid we would run by the shop, take our check back and give them a check for our portion of the total and be done. We still hadn’t heard anything by 1:00 so we decided to get in the car and start driving towards the shop, which was 20 miles away on the other side of Tucson. On the way Saul called and told us that Good Sam had called him and said they were way behind on processing claims and he had no idea when they might get ours done. With that we headed for the mall and just spent a couple hours shopping. Just before 4:00 we ran by Williams to see if they had heard anything and they told us that Saul had left on an emergency, but Sam, the night service advisor, told us that he had talked to Good Sam and they wouldn’t get to us until Friday. Oh well, they were still working with us and holding our check, so nothing lost except our plans for the day. We headed back to the coach for the rest of the day.

Friday, October 29th we left the coach after lunch and headed to Williams to settle up. I had called Sam and learned that he had just got off the phone with Good Sam and they had received their payment. We got to Williams, traded checks and we were finally finished. I will say that W.W. Williams is a great place to get work done if you have a diesel coach and need engine or transmission work done. Highly recommended! After settling up with Sam we went out and did some more geocaching in Northwest Tucson. We found five before we decided it was getting too hot. It was in the high nineties - two days before Halloween. Go figure. After caching we stopped at Walmart for some quick shopping and then headed back to the coach.

After we got the groceries put away we decided to go out to dinner. We have seen a place called Chuy’s at several locations around Tucson over the last couple of days and there was one just a couple of miles from the RV park. We decided to give them a try. It was an interesting place, sort of taqueria meets Mexican beach bar. Lots of wild paint and doodads hanging around. It was like a taqueria in that you had to go up the counter to place your order, but then they brought the food to your table. The food was OK, but not fantastic. We were not completely disappointed, but I don’t’ think we would go back again. The place was a big empty space, so it was noisy and with the ala carte menu it was a pain to order. We’ll stick to conventional Mexican restaurants.

Saturday, October 30th we finally got to go to the movies. We wanted to go in St. David, but there were no theaters. We wanted to go up here in Tucson, but the repair issue was holding us up. After lunch we went out to see “Hereafter”, a film directed by Clint Eastwood. The basic premise of the film was that there really is a hereafter, or heaven, or afterlife or whatever you want to call it, and the proof is that everyone who has a near death experience “sees” the same thing. The bright light, the peace, etc. etc. The movie has three distinct plot threads, a woman who has a near death experience in the Malaysian tsunami, a young boy who loses his brother in an auto accident, and a psychic who can talk with the dead. The movie alternates between these three plots until the last 20 minutes, when they all come together. (No further spoilers) I think the movie was elegantly filmed and it was a good character film, even if you don’t fully accept the premise. Jackie loved the film. I thought it was good, but not the best Eastwood has done. As a character film I liked “Grand Torino” much better. In my opinion Eastwood spent a little too much time on the details of the three plot lines, almost to the point of becoming tedious, and when the ending finally came is was abrupt and, to me, unsatisfying and incomplete. This is an excellent film to see if you have a strong belief in life after death and the ability to contact the dead.

After the movie we spent a little time shopping at the mall where the theater was located. We were going to walk the mall for a while, however, they had opened it to trick or treating kids and there were hundreds of little kids and their parents walking around the mall in costume, going from store to store. A cute idea and there were some very cute kids, but it made walking around the mall a little hard. After shopping we just went home for the rest of the day.

Sunday, October 31st - Happy Halloween! We left right after lunch and headed South of Tucson about 18 miles on Interstate 19 towards the retirement community of Green
Valley. What we were headed for was certainly old and retired, but not a person, a place - the Titan Missile Museum. The museum is located just about a mile West of the freeway, near exit 69, and is a deactivated ICBM silo that has been turned into a museum. The site was once known as Titan II ICBM Site 571-7, and was one of eighteen such silos ringing the Tucson metropolitan area. There was an additional eighteen silos near Wichita, Kansas, and another eighteen near Little Rock, Arkansas. Each site housed a single Titan II missile, armed with a single 9 megaton W-53 hydrogen bomb warhead.

The W-53 warhead, in addition to being the first nuclear weapon to be “mass produced”, was the largest-yield nuclear weapon ever fitted to an ICBM. The W-53 was a city destroyer class weapon which produced a fireball 2.5 to 3 miles in
diameter, producing radiant heat capable of causing fatal burns up to 18 miles from ground zero, irrespective of attendant blast damage. The blast effects would totally destroy any above ground structure in a nine mile radius. One of the maps on the wall of the visitor’s center showed the blast radius of the warhead superimposed over a map of Tucson, with ground zero at downtown, and the blast radius covered the entire city.

The tour of the site started with a short film and then a tour guide took us outside for a tour around the exterior of the site. Display items included an old Security Police Jeep, a number of equipment trailers, and the fueling trailers. Although the
Titan II was a liquid fuel rocket, the standard for the day, it used extremely stable fuel and oxidizer compounds which allowed the missile to be fueled upon installation in the silo and then left fueled. Other liquid fuel rockets had to be fueled just before launch, which meant that it could take up to four hours to launch a missile. The Titan II could be launched in less than one minute from receiving a launch order.

The cover for the silo is locked half open and the open half is covered with clear windows. This is to enable Russian spy satellites to see that the silo remains inactive. Although there is a real (unfueled) Titan II missile in the silo, there is a large hole cut in the nose cone, where the nuclear device would reside, to enable a satellite to see that there is nothing inside. This site was built in 1963 and decommissioned in 1982 as part of the START treaty. All of the other sites in the country were decommissioned and blown up, however, this one was saved as a museum.

After touring the outside we were led into the entrance hatch and went down about 100 feet to the launch facilities. The control center has two three ton blast doors and eight foot thick concrete and steel walls. The entire center is mounted on huge
springs to protect it from the shock of any nearby explosions. The entire launch room is smaller than the average hotel room and is very clearly vintage technology. The tour guide points out the various work stations and equipment and then conducts a mock launch sequence to demonstrate just how quickly the crews could have gotten their missile in the air. After the tour of the control room we were taken down a
long steel tunnel, also mounted on springs, to the other end of the complex where the silo is. There are windows cut in the silo so you can see the missile sitting in there. We then went back to the surface. The whole tour took about an hour and is very interesting. The cost of the museum is very reasonable, and I think anyone who lived through the cold war should visit if in the area.

We also learned that the same Titan II missiles used at these ICBM sites were used in the Gemini space program to launch our astronauts into space. After the ICBM sites were decommissioned in the 1980's, a lot of the missiles taken out of the ICBM sites were later used to launch satellites for the Air Force and for NASA. About half of the missiles that sat for years with huge nuclear weapons in their noses were later shot into space with satellites and other payloads. Talk about recycling!

After leaving the missile museum we headed North on Interstate 19 and stopped at the St. Xavier Mission. St. Xavier was founded in 1692 by the Spanish missionary Father Kino. The current structure was completed in 1797 and has been in continuous use since. It is still an active Catholic church. Its actual name is Mission San
Xavier Del Bac, but its nickname among Arizonans is “The White Dove of the Desert.” This mission was the northern-most mission in what is now Arizona, however, the Spanish missionaries had dozens of missions in Mexico and along the coast of California. The interior of the sanctuary is breathtaking with intricate
sculptured walls and frescos on the ceilings. The actual sanctuary is very long and narrow with the standard short naves on the alter end. This makes the floor plan of the sanctuary the shape of a cross with the alter area at the top. We also walked around the museum which had a lot of artifacts from the friars that have run the compound for the last 200 plus years.

After visiting the mission we headed home for the rest of the day. We got home just as the sun was going down and there were a few kids going through the RV park doing trick or treat. The park management had given out black and orange streamers for people to hang outside their RV or park model to designate who was giving out candy. We were not sure we were going to be home, so we didn’t put out any streamers. We also didn’t have any candy to give out. I did try to fix a leaking drain plug on our water heater and ended up breaking it off. I couldn’t get it fixed because the local Camping World RV store closed at 5:00 on Sunday. Had to shut the water heater off for the night.

Monday, November 1st, I was up early out getting parts at Camping World and Home Depot to fix the water heater. Took me a couple of hours to get the thing fixed, but now all is well. No more leak and we have hot water again. Yea! After lunch we went out and did some geocaching on the East end of Tucson. We were able to find fourteen caches during the afternoon, and one of them put us over the 1,900 finds
mark! Yea us! A number of the caches were along the edges of the Davis Monthan Air Force Base 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, the real long name for what is generally called the “Bone Yard”. The history of the Bone Yard starts immediately after World War II, when what was then the Army Air Corps established a storage facility for B-29 and C-47 aircraft at Davis-Monthan AFB. Today, the Bone Yard has grown to include more than 4,400 aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles (missiles) from the all branches of the armed forces, the Coast Guard, and several federal agencies including NASA. Some of the aircraft are kept in a mothballed state for possible use if necessary. Most are kept for spare parts or eventually broken up for scrap.

Two years ago the portion of the base visible from Kolb Avenue contained hundreds of Navy and Marine Corps F-14 “Tomcats” which were taken out of service. Today that same area is home to dozens of old C-130 “Hercules” cargo aircraft. I don’t know where they moved the F-14's to since the base is huge. Davis Monthan AFB is also
the home base for the last squadron of the infamous A-10 “Warthog” tank killer. These are attack aircraft famous for their “low and slow” abilities and their deadly 30 mm cannon in the nose. During the first Gulf War the A-10 was responsible for eliminating entire divisions of Iraqi tanks. Our RV park is right under the flight path for the main runway at Davis Monthan, so we watch A-10's and C-130's flying around all day and night. After our caching we settled in for the night, getting ready for our move in the morning from Tucson to Casa Grande.

Tuesday, October 2nd, we packed up the coach and hit the road about 10:00 a.m., headed for Casa Grande, about 90 Miles North on Interstate 10. After a quick stop for fuel in Coolidge, we arrived at the Western Horizon resort about noon. We got checked in and set up for a nice two week stay here in Casa Grande.

With our arrival here in Casa Grande I will close this chapter of our travel blog. I will post again when we leave here in two weeks. Until then, be happy, be alive, be safe!