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):
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:
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:
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):
Our coach, ready to hook up the truck:
We’re on our way; a bridge over wetland:
Colorado River:
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):
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):
In Parker, Arizona we encountered several VW buses, probably leaving a recent gathering of them at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City:
Highway:
Quartzsite sign:
I-10 freeway:
Mountains:
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:
So we continued to the next one, half an hour later:
Crackers, summer sausage, and cheeses for lunch:
Paladin wasn’t thrilled when we started going, but settled down in one of his nests during lunch:
When we got underway again, he was a little happier than earlier. We do hope he gets more used to travel days eventually:
Our 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:
The 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:
Notice that we didn’t extend the front driver-side slide-out, since the switch wasn’t working:
We didn’t bother unhooking our truck, since it’s just an overnight pitstop (an advantage of a pull-through site):
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.
