Preparing to Land

We're on our way to the Escapees Rainbow Park in Congress, Arizona. The trip from our summer house in Friendship, Maine, will encompass over 3300 miles, nearly 400 gallons of diesel fuel, and take us 43 days. We stopped in Rochester for 2 weeks, and had a few 2 and 3 night stops.

Today (11/9) we've stopped for our last overnight at a Flying J Travel Center in Winslow, Arizona. We've stopped in numerous Flying Js around the country, and despite the common brand name, they're all different. Many of them have an RV parking area out front, near the auto parking lot. This one has a few spaces, but none large enough for a 38' motorhome with a car in tow. So we schlumped around the back and found a spot in the middle of the truck parking lot, next to another RV.

We generally don't like to park in the truck area if we can avoid it. First and foremost, the commercial drivers are required to take rest stops, and we would rather not encumber a space that a trucker might need. Second, many truckers still let their engines idle overnight, to keep warm and have power. Some states are outlawing this practice, and stopping the engines could save millions of gallons of fuel every year. Some truck stops have developed alternatives to idling, such as systems that attach through a window in the cab with heat, AC, and electric hookups. Some truckers are installing generators in their cabs. But most have not, and so the truck lot is a noisy place at night. The upside of this for us is that nobody cares if we run our own generator, as the noise from it is hardly noticeable.

We stop here around 4:00 PM. I take Thumper for a walk around the parking lot twice, Consuelo continues her afghan knitting. At 6:00, we start dinner. Tonight we consume Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and a couple of Lean Cuisine paninis. Winslow has poor off-air TV reception, so we end up going to bed early, around 9:00.

We're both excited at the prospect of landing in the Escapee park later today. We still have 230 miles to travel, and some of it over an unknown mountainous route, causing a little apprehension. Before we depart here, we'll fill out fuel tank for the last time, pump up the tires, and get a good walk in to start the day.

We've also stayed in several of the Escapee parks around the country; Bushnell Florida, Summerdale Alabama, Heiskell Tennessee, Livingston Texas, Casa Grande and Yuma Arizona, Aguanga California. Like Flying Js, the Escapees parks are all different, too. We've had lots of fun with the snowbirds and fulltimers in the various parks. They're always friendly and thinking up things to do.

So, let's hit the road for the last ride before we land for a few weeks. We can't wait!