We're gearing up for the Baseball Trip...

Our motorhome has been at the RV Hospital, AKA La Mesa RV for over six weeks getting its mechanical parts all in order. Pretty hard to do considering it is about 18 years old! It’s a 1997 Residency by Thor. Thor doesn’t really exist anymore. They went bankrupt I think and have resurrected themselves but they don’t seem to acknowledge our Residency any more. Oh well, I don’t think the motorhome’s feelings have been hurt.

We have added a tow bar to the Jeep so we’ll have our “toad” with us when we embark on our latest adventure. That was about a $4000 addition with the auto-braking option I insisted on. Of course I think there is a law that we HAVE to have an auto-braking thingy (that’s a technical term that you non-motorhomers probably wouldn’t understand) on the car when it’s towed.

There’s lots more than that to do to get ready. We fueled it this morning, it took 74 gallons ($132, not bad!) so it was running on fumes! It has an 80 gallon tank and gets about 6 miles to the gallon so it probably would have run out in not too many miles!

We’re taking it back to La Mesa because the sink has a major leak. Considering they were supposed to fix that and did add a new faucet, that should be a freebie. We need new windshield wipers. I spent about 3 hours cleaning the refrigerator yesterday. This morning I’ll clean and dust and vacuum—after all, it’s been almost exactly 5 years since we drove it! Because we’ve had other trips to do, we stopped the insurance and the registration about 4 years ago. Arizona’s pretty good, all we had to do was pay for this past year and $1 for a 3-day temporary permit.

I have to make a checklist for the Jeep to put it in the mode to be towed. We got a demo from the Jeep dealer yesterday just as a double check. This car isn’t even as simple as the 02Trailblazer let alone our previous Jeep. That one was a three or four step process; this is about eight steps. Luckily we both love checklists. We have checklists of our checklists!

Next week we’re going to PHX for a VIP tour of the baseball park and we’ll take the motorhome as a shakedown “cruise” before we start the Baseball Trip. I think we’re going to need it after five years! The motorhome seems to run fine but I’m learning that finding RV parks isn’t going to be as easy as it used to be.

Used to be there was a paper (THICK!) book (Woodalls) listing all the RV parks in the US. There were also smaller books that covered just the eastern or western US but it apparently doesn’t exist anymore. To find an RV park now in, for instance, PHX, I did a google search on “rv parks in phoenix.” That gave me 5, 790,000 hits. OK, not so simple anymore! Top of the list: RV Camping and RV Parks –Good Sam Club. Filled in the box with Arizona and Phoenix and I got 54 results with a park in Kelso, WA, at the top of the list (?)! Moving down the list I found #2 was Desert Shadows RV Resort in Phoenix with lots of info, but no prices. For that I had to go to the website. Expensive to my mind, $45.90 + tax. To find out if they have room, I have to call or make an online reservation. But if I make the reservation and can’t use it for whatever reason, there is a cancellation fee! So unless I call them, I don’t know if they have room. So back to the search.

But they all are like that. And very few have maps so I don’t know if Goodyear is anywhere near the baseball stadium in Phoenix or Mesa or Tempe. Very frustrating and time consuming! I thought computers and the internet would make life easier! It’s going to be really frustrating on our trip unless I can find a more efficient way to research RV parks! And a lot more expensive that we thought! We can get a Marriott hotel room for $100+/- most of the time. Several of the RV parks in the PHX area are $70+!

Ah well, in a hundred years we’ll look back at this and laugh!