Thursday, March 8th, the wind had died down overnight and the temperatures were supposed to get at least in the upper 60's today. We needed a cache find for this date too, so we decided to spend the afternoon caching. We went out after lunch and managed to get nine new finds in a few hours. We also had one DNF. We didn’t get as many as we might normally get in three hours, but Casa Grande is an area that we have cached around quite a bit in the last few years, so the caches we haven’t found, either new or left over, are kind of scattered and tend to be out in the desert where it takes a little longer to get to the area.
After caching we went back to the park for a quick dinner and then down to the clubhouse for Texas Hold’em. Each park has it’s own rules and protocols for these card games, and this one is a little more strict. It’s still a $5 buy-in and two hours of play, but the betting rules are tighter. There are also a lot more players than we saw in Indio. At this park they actually expect you to use a sign up sheet that’s in the clubhouse and, had it not been for a couple of last minute cancellations, we wouldn’t have been able to play because we had not signed up in advance. All the tables were filled. I had a pretty good night, ending up a little over two bucks ahead. Jackie, not so much. She lost about seven dollars.
Friday, March 9th, we decided we needed to get some laundry done since the underwear supply was running low. We have lots of clothes and could probably go months without washing, except for undies. Not quite enough of those to go much beyond a couple weeks. After lunch we loaded the clothes in the car and went to a laundry we have used on previous visits. There is a fairly nice laundry at the park, but they don’t like you to use more than two machines at a time and we had a lot of stuff to wash, including linens. We read while the laundry was washing and just relaxed.
After the clothes were done we went down to the mall to check out the J.C. Penny store. We have always been big fans of Penny’s and buy a lot of our clothes there. We have recently seen TV ads indicating that they have revised their pricing and sales policies and we wanted to check them out. Turns out they have lowered the prices on a lot of stuff and did away with a lot of the silly discounts and sales hype. Seems like it will work out OK. I got a couple of new tee shirts and Jackie got some earrings. After shopping we noticed that there were a couple of new caches (at least to us) in the mall parking lot area, so we went ahead and claimed them. We didn’t need caches for this date, but couldn’t pass them up when we were so close and it was so convenient. We then went back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Saturday, March 10th, we finally had the makings of a nice day. The wind had laid down overnight and the temperatures were supposed to be in the low 70's. After lunch we went out to do some more caching and we worked the area near downtown Casa Grande and to the southwest of town. In the course of about four hours we had eleven new finds with one new DNF. Normally it wouldn’t take that long for eleven or twelve caches, but most of these were out in the boonies and it took a little longer to get from cache to cache. Several of them were also very clever hides and took a little longer than usual to find. A lot of urban caches are simple and predictable. You come up on the coordinates of a cache and you see a large electric power transformer on the ground. Chances are the cache is going to be a magnetic container stuck under a lip on the transformer. Same with caches in parking lots. It will probably be under the skirt of a light pole.
Out in the desert or the farm fields it’s a little different. One cache we found today was a bison tube, which is a small aluminum tube with a screw off lid, that was in a phone pole. The cache owner had pried out a large knot on the side of the pole, about an inch in diameter, attached the bison tube by a wire to a cork from a wine bottle. The end of the cork had been “distressed”, made to look like rough wood. The combo was then put in the hole. Just looking at the cork from the outside it looked like any other knot on a tree or pole. However, if you touched it you could get it to wiggle a little. Took the tweezers and pulled it out and found the bison tube hidden underneath. Very clever hide. After our caching we headed home for the rest of the night.
Sunday, March 11th, we decided to go out caching again after lunch because we needed to have at least one cache for the date. We have kind of gotten into the task of filling our date grid, so off we went. In the course of a little over two hours we managed to get three caches. A little explanation may be in order. We have extensively cached the Casa Grande area, both on previous trips here, and this most recent visit. As a result, the remaining caches that we have not yet found, are scattered around the edges of town and tend to be caches that are difficult to get to. Our first visit was to the cache that we had logged a DNF for on Saturday. The cache was adjacent to the parking lot of some kind of industrial business near downtown, which was closed on the weekend, and the our GPS units put us right between two trees. The difficulty rating of this cache was 3 out of 5, which means it is fairly hard to find. Our reading of some previous logs for this cache also seemed to indicate that it was very difficult to find because most of the people who logged finds said they had been here multiple times looking for the cache and only found it because of help, either from the cache owner or a hint from someone else who had found it.
After we got back to the coach on Saturday and looked at the cache’s web page we discovered that our friends Peggy and Vernon had found it late last year, also with help from the owner. We emailed them and asked for some help. They told us that the cache was in an irrigation control box set in the ground. I had remembered seeing one between the two trees, and had even looked into it but had seen what appeared to be a normal irrigation control valve. With this new found information we left the coach and returned to the cache location. I went to the box, pulled the cover and sure enough, the wires connected to the solenoid on the valve weren’t connected to anything. However, when I unscrewed the solenoid it was not the cache, it was just a regular solenoid. I couldn’t get any other part of the valve off, and we were stymied again.
We left that cache and started towards a couple of other ones along the highway that runs northwest out of Casa Grande towards the town of Maricopa. There were three caches along this route. The first one we approached we found that the cache was on the west side of the railroad tracks that run parallel to the road and it didn’t appear that there were any crossings nearby. We skipped that one, deciding we would try again on the trip back, and continued towards Maricopa. The second cache in the trio was on the east side of the road, but our GPS put it a quarter mile off the road in the desert, and again there were no roads or tracks going out to the area and no way for us to get off road. We didn’t feel like walking a quarter mile in the desert, so we skipped that one too. The last cache we had on our list was another seven miles up the road and again we discovered it was west of the tracks. This time though we found a road that crossed the tracks and intersected with what was indicated on the map and the GPS as Cowtown Road. The cache was supposed to be on this road, a mile or so south of where we crossed the tracks.
Well, Cowtown Road turned out to be not much of a road. Since we have a Jeep, and it has four wheel drive, we kept going, but it was tough. The road was very deep sand so I had to keep the speed up lest we get stuck. We finally got to where the cache was supposed to be and I found some hard ground to stop on. We found the cache
in short order and finally had our find for the day. It was pretty easy to find, a large piece of PVC sewer pipe fastened to a phone pole. Yea. Our map indicated that the first cache we skipped over was also on Cowtown Road, about eight miles south, so we just kept going south on the sand trail. When we got within about two miles of the cache location the sand trail just stopped at the banks of a fairly large wash - there was no way to continue south. Rats!We backtracked about two miles to a regular country road that I remembered passing which we could use to go around the river and catch Cowtown Road from the other side of the large wash. This little detour took us another half hour of travel. We finally got to the cache location and were able to find the cache fairly quickly. Yea, two for the day, and about 90 minutes of travel and 25 miles of driving on sand and dirt trails. While we had been doing this Jackie had gotten Vernon on the phone and got more information on the cache downtown that was eluding us. We headed there again, third time being the charm, we hoped. When we arrived we found an older couple already there and they too were caching. They were fairly new at the hobby and had no idea what they were looking for. We told them that this was our third try for this one and that we had some spoiler information, so we let them search for a while on their own while we waited. We didn’t want to spoil the fun for them, and they just might find the cache on their own.
They didn’t have any luck and finally said to go ahead and try to find it with our hints. I went back to the box and looked again and finally figured out that the entire valve, which is a pretty good sized item, maybe six inches high and wide, was set in a concrete blob that was also big, about eight inches around. What I finally found after fiddling with it for a while was that the entire thing, valve unit and concrete block rotated and screwed off the top of a six inch sewer pipe buried in the ground. When I unscrewed the phony valve and took it out of the box, where was the cache in the hidden pipe. Very devious. Also a little unfair because the vast majority of cachers would not try to move an irrigation valve in such a fashion for fear of breaking something. Most cachers are very careful when searching for hides not to push, pull, twist or disconnect things that might be real. Anyway, we logged the find, finally, and decided that three was enough for the day. We headed back to the coach for the rest of the day and evening.
Monday, March 12th, we decided to take a bit of a day off. Both Jackie and I did a few minor chores and repair jobs around the coach, but for the most part we simply relaxed and played games. At about 6:00 we did leave the coach and go down to the clubhouse for Texas Hold’em. We had a pretty good night. We played for a little over two hours and I ended up even, I made back my five dollar buy-in, and Jackie was four dollars ahead. About two and a quarter an hour for the both of us. I think this was about minimum wage when I was in high school. After cards we went back to the coach for the night.
Tuesday, March 13th, my son Roy Jr’s birthday. Happy Birthday! My youngest child is 38 and I find it amazing that the kids get older but I don’t. Hmmm. We decided that we needed to make a grocery run since the cupboards were getting pretty bare. I also decided to go to a local urgent care to get my ear looked at. When I was at the doctor in Palm Desert a couple weeks ago for my physical I mentioned to him that my ear felt like it was getting plugged up. He checked it and told me it was probably allergies and that I should take Zyrtec to ease the congestion. Well, I did that, but the ear never seemed to get better. It seemed perpetually plugged and I couldn’t hear on the left side at all. Since I also have tinnitus, all I could hear was the buzzing and ringing which was driving me crazy. After two weeks I figured I needed to have someone take another look.
I found an urgent care on the Internet, called NextCare, located in Casa Grande. They had a couple dozen locations all over Arizona, so I guessed they were probably a reputable outfit. I made an appointment, which I could start online, which was handy, and we went in after lunch. The office was brand new and well equipped, and the staff was very nice. Also very nice was not having to pay anything thanks to medicare. Cha Ching! I saw a physician’s assistant who looked in my ear and found that it was plugged with wax. She had her nurse come in and put some drops in. I had to leave them in for ten minutes and I could hear the fizzing and popping in my ear, I guess as it softened the wax. Then the nurse came in and flushed the ear with a turkey baster and out popped a couple big wax plugs. Yea, I can hear!
After the nurse visit we hit the local Walmart Supercenter and loaded up the larder again. We went home and put away the groceries and changed clothes for dinner. We had made plans to meet our friends Jim and Pat Goetzinger, who are also staying at Desert Shadows, at a local steakhouse. Regular readers may recall we met Jim and Pat for lunch in Colorado Springs back in September when our paths crossed, and saw them again in January in Indio at the FMCA rally. They are also full timers and we run across them from time to time.
We went to a very nice restaurant near old town Casa Grande called BeDillon’s. The restaurant is in an old, turn of the century, adobe house and is distinctly upscale for Casa Grande. They kept the original room layout of the house so there are several small dining areas rather than one big one. The menu was very nice, and a little pricey, but the food and service were excellent. If you find yourself in Casa Grande and want a nice upscale place for dinner, I can recommend BeDillon’s, which is on Park Avenue, two blocks north of Florence. We had a very nice dinner with the Goetzingers and caught up with what we have each been doing for the last couple months. After dinner we headed back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Wednesday, March 14th, the weather weenies were predicting a gorgeous desert day with temperatures in the low eighties and just a little breeze. This was a perfect caching forecast and we were glad because today was one of the dates we needed to fill in our statistical grid. We have never found a cache on 3/14. After lunch we headed out and had a great afternoon. We were out about four hours and managed to get 18 new finds. We also had three new DNFs, but we did some pretty hard caches too. One of the DNFs was rated a 4 difficulty, which is very hard. All of the caches were out in the farm fields or the desert area to the east of Casa Grande. After caching we went back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Thursday, March 15th was a “chill day” for us and we just stayed around the coach all day. I spent a couple of hours working on our taxes (yech!) and did a few little chores. Jackie did likewise. Mostly, we just relaxed. After an early dinner we went to the clubhouse for Texas Hold’em. Again, we had a pretty decent night. I ended up a dollar up on the night and Jackie was up four dollars at the end. At this rate we can buy a couple gallons of fuel when we leave here. OK, maybe a gallon and a half. After poker we went back to the coach for the night.
Friday, March 16th, we left the coach after lunch and drove about ten miles east of town to the Pinal County Fairgrounds for the County Fair. This was the third day of the fair and it was senior day, which meant half price for us. The fair was kind of small,
especially compared to the fair in Indio or the Arizona State Fair, but it was still a lot of fun. There were dozens of vendors and booths to look at and the weather was perfect. We even watched a wild animal show with a couple of really cute baboons. In a really strange twist we were walking down the midway and there was a booth for a guy running for Sheriff of Pinal County named Tom Bearup. I told Jackie, I know that name. Then I saw a picture of him, about the same time the guy in the booth turned around, and I recognized him as having worked for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office during part of the time I was there. I introduced myself and after he heard my name he remembered me too. We had a nice chat, talked about how he ended up down here and why he decided to run for Sheriff. He had tried to run against Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix a couple times, but kept getting beat in the primaries because Joe was so popular. We chatted for about ten minutes before moving on. Small world.
We spent about an hour going through the livestock pens. All the local FFA and 4-H kids had their livestock on display and it was a lot of fun. We especially enjoyed the sheep
, goats, rabbits and chickens. Jackie got to play with a seven day old goat kid and his fur was as soft as Smokey’s. We ended up spending about three hours or so walking around the fair and had a very nice time. Small town fairs are a hoot.After the fair we went back to the coach for a short rest and to change clothes. A little after five we left again and went to the Casa Grande Elks Lodge. We were there to get a cocktail, have dinner and do some karaoke later in the evening. Pat and Jim Goetzinger met us for cocktails and we had a nice chat. They didn’t want corn beef and cabbage, which was what they were serving for dinner in honor of St. Patrick’s Day,
so they left just before seven. We ordered dinner, which was pretty good, although I could always eat more corn beef than they serve at these kinds of events. After dinner they started the karaoke and there were a lot of people who stayed around to watch. There were about eight singers in the rotation and most of them were quite good. You could tell by the way people interacted that this was a regular group who probably came here every week for karaoke night.One guy was a professional singer named Louis Fontaine and he was very good. He did a Louis Prima song, Gigolo, that Jackie loves. He did all his songs with just the music,
no words on the TV. I always envy singers who can remember all the words. That is my downfall, my memory just doesn’t work for memorizing song lyrics. I got to sing about four songs before they had some trouble with the player and had to take a break. Since it was already 9:30 we said our goodbyes and headed back to the coach for the rest of the night. A very full and very fun day.Saturday, March 17th, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to ya! We left the coach just before noon and went to a local Mexican restaurant called Mi Amigo Ricardo. It was actually right next door to the Elks Lodge where we were last night. We met our friends Bonnie and Ken Woepke there for lunch. We have known Bonnie and Ken, who are also full time RVers, for many years, having met them on the road at a FMCA Full Timers Chapter rally. We cross paths with them from time to time since they also used to spend a lot of the winter in the Southwest. Last year they leased a spot at the Escapee’s Co-op park here in Casa Grande, so now they spend nearly the entire winter here. The Escapee’s RV club has RV parks all over the country where people can lease lots for long term use at a very reasonable cost. The only drawback is that there is a long waiting list at the parks. Ken and Bonnie were on the list for over three years before their name came up for a vacancy.
We had a really nice lunch, the food was pretty good, and the conversation was great. We caught up on what we have been doing since the last time we saw them, over a year ago in November 2010. After lunch we headed out for some caching. We decided that we would go caching today because the weather reports for the last few days have been calling for rain for Sunday and Monday, our last two days here in Casa Grande. This would be our last chance in this area. We left the restaurant and headed out for some caching in the desert and farming area south of town. As I have mentioned before, we have cached this area pretty heavily over the last couple years, so the caches were kind of far apart and in remote areas. Nonetheless, we let the Geo-Jeep have it’s head and out into the desert we went. We actually ended up with eleven new finds and one DNF. We found some very interesting areas, including a place called Arizona City, which appears to be a planned residential area that is only about half built out. I don’t think it is incorporated as a city or town, but it has at least a thousand residences or so with nearly as many empty lots
. One area has a very large man-made lake and some of the lakeside homes have boat docks with small electric pontoon boats. There was also a cache near a series of what appeared to be very old, and very large concrete domes. There were seven or eight of them, some connected others not. They were about 100 high and some had weird doors and windows, or openings of some type, in them. They were out in the middle of the desert, no roads, no other buildings, nothing else around. Almost alien looking. Hmmmmm? As we cached we saw the clouds starting to roll in from the west and the wind picked up to the point where it was very windy. We got back to the coach just before 5:00 and as we pulled up to our parking spot I saw one of the plastic covers from our air conditioning units lying on the ground next to our coach. The wind had ripped it right off, breaking the plastic around all four of the retaining screws. I gathered my tools and with the judicious use of some new screws, really big washers, and two bungee cords, I managed to get it fastened back onto the A/C unit. I didn’t want the coming rain to get into the unit because the motor for the condenser fan is exposed if the cover is not on. The water would not get into the coach, but it wouldn’t do the innards of the A/C any good to get soaked. I am glad I was able to get it temporarily back on without getting blown off the roof. After that little adventure we just stayed in the rest of the evening.
Sunday, March 18th, the promised rain rolled in about 4:00 a.m. and it rained steadily for over 24 hours. There were no thunderstorms and even the wind died down, it just rained. Mostly a steady moderate rain, but there were times when it really poured. Most people, who don’t spend a lot of time in the Arizona desert, don’t picture the area as getting rain. One of the reasons the Sonoran Desert is greener than the other North American deserts is the fact that it gets about twice the rain. It’s still not a lot in comparison to other areas of the country, less than 15 inches a year, but it does rain, and it can rain hard and long.
I have vivid memories from the late 1970's of the flooding in the Phoenix area. I was working for the Sheriff’s Office at the time, so I was very aware of the destruction and problems that the storms caused. Between October 1977 and February 1980, there were seven floods. Phoenix was declared a disaster area three times and 18 people lost their lives. We had three “100 year” floods and one “500 year” flood during that period. For weeks at a time the Phoenix metropolitan area was nearly an island as the rivers that surrounded the city, the Gila, the Salt, the Aqua Fria and the Hasyamppa, all reached record flood stages. At that time many river crossings were not bridged because the rivers ran so infrequently that it seemed at the time to be a waste of resources. Of course, when the river floods, the road is closed. In addition, during that three year period most of the bridges that did exist were washed out and collapsed. Several of them were washed out twice, once in 1977 and then the rebuilt one was washed away in 1979.
I personally watched the bridge on Indian School Road across the Aqua Fria river tumble into the river. I lived only a few miles from the river and heard on the police scanner that the bridge was about to collapse. I drove out to watch. At one time there were only three bridges that withstood the flooding and provided the only egress from the metro area to other parts of Arizona. It created havoc with the Sheriff’s Office patrol since we had to set up temporary patrol stations in the rural areas beyond the rivers. Otherwise it took too long for patrol cars to get to emergency calls.
Of course, the rain in Casa Grande today was no where near that, but I thought it would be interesting to include some of my Arizona memories. We didn’t go anywhere, just stayed in the coach, watched the rain, and spent a leisure day with the computers and the TV. The rain is supposed to taper off tomorrow and Tuesday, our next travel day, is supposed to be clear. Yea!
Monday, March 19th, the skies were still somewhat cloudy when we woke up, but it appeared to be breaking up. The weather forecast only called for a chance of rain today, so we were hopeful. After having lunch at the coach we left and went to the laundromat for another round of clothes cleaning. We didn’t want to have to worry about doing laundry for a couple weeks while we are in Phoenix, so we decided it was time for laundry. It took a couple hours for laundry and then we stopped at Walmart for some last minute supplies.
Mostly we needed to get bottled water for the rally. We will be dry camping, no water except what we carry in the tanks of the coach. That water is fine for showering and dishes, but we don’t like to drink it or make ice with it. Once we had our provisions we went to the Olive Garden restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner. The food was very good, as it usually is at Olive Garden, but the service was very poor. The service at these places is generally very good, so we were surprised at how slow and non-interactive the staff was. We were not impressed at all. After lunch we made one more quick stop at a grocery store for milk and ice, which we didn’t want to buy before lunch, and then headed back to the coach. Later in the evening we went down to the clubhouse for our last round of Texas Hold’em here at Casa Grande. Tonight was not our night. I ended up down three dollars and Jackie was down about six. This was the first time this trip that we didn’t win. I guess it was a fond farewell from the park to us. After cards we went back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Tuesday, March 20th, the first day of Spring and another travel day. Today we travel from Casa Grande to the west side of the Phoenix area to the Good Sam Club RV rally. The trip is about 65 miles and we wanted to get out fairly early so we could get to the rally grounds around noon or earlier. We managed to get on the road about 10:00 and started north on I-10 towards Phoenix. Our route took us right through the middle of Phoenix, from east to west. Although it was freeway all the way I am familiar enough with the Phoenix area, having grown up there, to understand that traffic could be pretty bad sometimes. Fortunately, there was nothing more than modest mid-day traffic and no delays, so we got through town very easily. We arrived at the Walmart store north of where the rally was being held just after 11:00 and got a spot in their parking lot. We stopped here to wait for our friends the Bullocks who were coming from Apache Junction, Arizona in the east part of the valley. We wanted to go in together so we would be parked at the rally together.
The Bullocks arrived just before noon and we both started down to the rally grounds. The rally is being held at the Phoenix International Raceway which is where NASCAR and the Indy cars race. The NASCAR race was just here two weeks ago. Although we have been to a lot of rallies, most of them have been FMCA rallies. This is our first Good Sam Club rally. They are referred to as “The Rally” and we have always heard good things about them. Unlike FMCA, which is only for motor homes, Good Sam allows all types of RVs and they were expecting about 3,000 RVs for this one.
Our initial impressions, as first time attendees, was not especially positive. We arrived at the entry site for the rally and got put into a line with a hundred other RVs and we just sat there. And sat there. We were sitting in line, not going anywhere, for nearly two hours. For whatever reason, the parking people could not get the work done and RVs were just stacking up. Finally, the dam broke and everyone moved out to the parking lots. Once they got the ball rolling we were parked in pretty short order. The parking sites are much tighter than those at an FMCA rally. They tell you that you have to put your tow car next to your coach, but there was simply not enough room when two coaches with slideouts were parked next to each other. The sites were only 20 feet wide and the streets were very narrow too. The parking crew we talked to said that these were restrictions put on them by the raceway people, not Good Sam. They told us that usually the sites they lay out are much bigger, but the raceway wanted them to use their pre-marked parking spots.
Once we got parked we took the tram service into the rally site, which is on the infield of the race track, and got our registration completed. We then went back to the coach and had happy hour with the Bullocks and our friends the Wilsons, who are parked just a few coaches down in the same row. Later on Jackie made chili reallno casserole and we and the Bullocks had a nice dinner together.
We will be here at the rally until next Monday and will then be moving to an RV resort on the northwest side of Phoenix. This seems like a great place to close this episode and get it published, so that’s what we’ll do. We will publish again in a couple weeks. Until then, live, love and laugh like there’s no tomorrow. See ya.
