Travel from Lake Havasu City to Buckeye, AZ

We departed the Xscapers Annual Bash near Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and headed to a one-night stay at Leaf Verde RV Resort near Buckeye, Arizona.

Here’s the route map (top to right); 165 miles, about four hours drive in our coach (including a lunch break):

Map route

A fairly familiar route, having been along I-10 a few times this winter.

But the trip had a bumpy start; we couldn’t bring in our front driver-side slide-out, or move the driver chair, due to a disconnected wire underneath the chair:

Disconnected wire

Disconnected wire

This stop was the first time we had rotated that chair around to face the living area, so we guess the wire didn’t have as much slack as it should, and got pulled out.

Obviously this is a big problem; we can’t drive with the slide out. The reason the slide was affected is the switch to extend or retract it is on the side of the chair, to help ensure the chair is forward enough to not get hit.

Fortunately there is an emergency retraction button in the fuse bay in the basement, so I was able to use that to bring in the slide:

Emergency rectraction

Also fortunately we had an appointment at the National Indoor RV Center in Phoenix the next day, so we only had to live with this issue for one day.

That issue worked around, we moved the coach to a clear space at the Xscapers Bash grounds to hook up our toad (tow vehicle); you can see our truck and the neighboring coach (nice folks, that we enjoyed meeting and chatting with):

Xscapers General section

Our coach, ready to hook up the truck:

RV

We’re on our way; a bridge over wetland:

Bridge over wetland

Wetland

Colorado River:

Colorado River

Colorado River

Hilly highway:

Hilly highway

Hilly highway

Our coach has an RV-safe GPS, that knows the height and other info about our rig, so it doesn’t route us places we can’t go (we also have a label above the GPS as a reminder for low bridges):

GPS

A fun and handy feature of the GPS is the ability to mirror the output to the (otherwise pretty useless) TV above the windshield — useful so I can see the GPS more easily (it just displays grayscale for some reason):

GPS on TV

TV and windscreen

In Parker, Arizona we encountered several VW buses, probably leaving a recent gathering of them at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City:

WV buses

Highway:

Highway

Quartzsite sign:

Quartzsite sign

I-10 freeway:

Highway

Mountains:

Mountains

Cacti:

Cacti

We would have liked to stop at the first rest area on the I-10 portion of the route, but it’s been closed for a while for renovations:

Closed rest area

So we continued to the next one, half an hour later:

Open rest area

Crackers, summer sausage, and cheeses for lunch:

Lunch

Paladin wasn’t thrilled when we started going, but settled down in one of his nests during lunch:

Paladin

When we got underway again, he was a little happier than earlier. We do hope he gets more used to travel days eventually:

Paladin

Our exit:

Exit

We had a one-night stay at Leaf Verde RV Resort; I won’t bother doing a separate post about it, since we basically just stopped there to dump our tanks after dry camping for over a week during the Bash, to catch up on laundry, and as a location fairly close to the National Indoor RV Center:

Leaf Verde RV Resort

The map:

Map

From the little we’ve seen of it, I wouldn’t call it a resort; while the transient campsites are mostly pull-through, they are fairly tight “buddy” sites, where pairs of RVs face opposite directions, and thus their doors face each other. Not very nice:

Campsite

Notice that we didn’t extend the front driver-side slide-out, since the switch wasn’t working:

Campsite

We didn’t bother unhooking our truck, since it’s just an overnight pitstop (an advantage of a pull-through site):

Campsite

A timelapse of this travel is coming tomorrow. Please subscribe to the Sinclair Trails YouTube channel; I need a bunch more subscribers to be able to get a nicer URL.