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.
