Richard was up bright and early this morning with an alarm to be able to get ‘Izzy’, the Ioniq back to Hertz in Palm Desert as early as he could. When Richard called yesterday to find out if Hertz had a ‘drop box’ service for the key drop off, he decided he would do the drop box, instead of waiting until 8am when the Hertz location opened for the day. Izzy was our least favorite car that we have rented on our journey. We liked ‘Kramer’ the Kona the best for how much room it had, as well as the functioning of the GPS/Apple Car play. Izzy was possessed at times with the Apple Car play disconnecting and the radio coming on, despite having turned the radio off! Half the time I used maps on my phone to guide us around the Palm Springs area, since the map wouldn’t display using Apple Car Play. Izzy had a dysfunctional NAV system, but we did like the hybrid fuel efficiency, which was 55 MPG. Richard put in $20 of fuel before dropping off Izzy and then called a Lyft to get back to Motorcoach Country Club.
See ya ‘Izzy’. We weren’t a fan unfortunately, other than the gas mileage!
While Richard was off dealing with ‘Izzy’, I got in a quick workout, and had a nice shower in our little casita. It was nice to have a casita this week and be able to take long, hot showers without worrying about how much hot water we were using. That is one thing about RV life that is different than in our own home. The hot water tank is only 12 gallons, so we cannot let it run like we might at home!
After showering and dressing in the casita, I decided I would pick a few of the grapefruits hanging over our casita to see how they would taste for breakfast. One of the grapefruit I picked, was the biggest grapefruit I have ever seen!
Look how big that grapefruit is! Its bigger than the bowl!
White grapefruit! Usually white grapefruit are bitter, but these white grapefruit were almost as sweet as the pink grapefruit we had picked from our other RV spot in Motorcoach Country Club. It sure is nice to walk out the ‘house’ and pick fresh, juicy citrus fruit for breakfast!
When Richard came back to Newman this morning, he was quite worried about the electrical smell we smelled yesterday and wondered would the slides work and come in, when we pushed the buttons to bring them in. Since our jacks were up, there was no worrying about the jacks being the issue and not letting us leave Indio. We pushed each slide button separately, so we didn’t overload the system and prayed and waited for the slides to come in. And the slides came in just like they normally do and we didn’t smell anything burning! Wonders never cease with Newman!!! We are wondering if there was a power surge yesterday when we plugged Newman in, and that was the cause of the smell? We have a built in surge protector, so if the electrical current is bad, the surge protector makes sure Newman’s electrical system doesn’t get fried!
After unhooking all of our mechanicals and filling up with water, my job was to help Richard back up without hitting a rock, or the power pedestal in our RV spot. While he was backing up, I noticed across the street in the common area there was a lemon tree. So of course I had to pick some fresh lemons for our journey, but after I had Newman backed up of course!
Freshly picked lemons! I squeezed one of these lemons into a glass of club soda as I write this blog and is it ever good!
We were on the road heading for Tucson just before 9am. We knew we had a very long driving day today, and we wanted to try and get into our RV park in Tucson, before the sun went down. The trip was going to be 363 miles today and with a time change to Mountain time, we were not sure how much daylight we actually had for driving.
In Coachella, getting on Hwy 10 East, which we will be on for a very long time!
He’s a happy driver…he can drive for hours without stopping!
As soon as we got on Hwy 10 East and left Coachella, California, there wasn’t much to look at for miles, and miles and miles except for desert scrub!
We did see some ‘smoke’ in the distance, but it turned out to be a sand storm in the desert.
Somebody lost their load off their truck, which caused a bit of delay for everyone to pass by. I’m reading the book in the photo called ‘The Wonder’ by the same author who wrote ‘Room’ - Emma Donaghue. Its an interesting book, though not as good as ’Room’ though.
It seemed to take forever to get to the Arizona border. It definitely looked closer on the map, than how long it took to get to the border.
Finally! Arizona. That means we are seen 4 states so far. Washington, Oregon, California, and now Arizona. And a few more to go before we get to Florida!
We had seen that diesel was cheaper in Arizona than in California, so we stopped at the first truck stop inside the Arizona border and filled Newman up. We only needed $175 worth of fuel, so we have been managing our fuel very well, considering we have no fuel gauge with the issues going on with Newman’s dashboard. The last thing we need is to run out of diesel fuel!
There were some small mountain climbs we had to do going through Arizona.
I kept feeding Richard, and he kept driving, so we made good time today, other than a bit of a traffic jam south of Phoenix.
As we were driving towards Tucson we saw that there was this very large mountain range in the distance. I looked at the map of Arizona to see what the name of this mountain was called.
And I discovered that the tallest mountain peak was called ‘Newman Peak’, In the Picacho Mountains. The elevation of Newman Peak is 4,480 feet. Picacho is a Spanish word derived from the word ‘pico’ which means ‘peak’. So today, Newman met Newman on our drive down to Tucson!
As we were entering Tucson we hit traffic again for a short while. All we wanted to do was get to our RV site. Why does the last 30 minutes of the drive always take the longest?
We were almost at our exit for our RV park in Tucson. As you can see the sky is getting quite dark!
We made it to Rincon Country West RV Resorts, in Tucson around 5:15pm.
This is the largest RV resort we have ever stayed! There are 1139 RV and mobile homes in this place! We are in row ‘S’‘and they have rows starting at ‘A’, all the way to ‘W’.
What a huge place we are staying in for 2 nights!
Richard had to back Newman up into this very tight space.
The tires on Newman’s right side are almost touching the cement pad! I am getting better at being the signal person to help back Newman in, but I still don’t have the hand signals down pat! Richard says there is too much ‘flailing’ but I think whatever I do, does the job and gets us in the spot ok!
We made it! A one stop drive today! Wow! How does Richard do it?
And we have not caught our little mouse friend yet either, although there was no evidence last evening, so maybe when we moved to the new RV site at lot 129, our friend left us when we brought in the slides? Who knows? I just don’t like the thought that we have a passenger that is a free loader!
What a long day we had today on the road! We are glad to be stopped for 2 nights here in Tucson. And tomorrow we get to play golf in Tucson with a friend of mine from the Niagara Peninsula! Yeah! It was also nice that Newman was able to meet his namesake today. Who knew that our big Newman had a mountain named after him?!!
We’ll rest quickly here in Tucson for the long days of driving we will need to try and get to Florida for Christmas. Richard is thinking we might arrive on December 23rd. We’ll see about that. We have been on the road now since October 16th, Just over 2 months since we left home, with of course 28 days stopped in Fanny Bay. We’ve seen so many things we never thought we would see on this trip, and gone places we never thought we would go. As we were chatting today on our drive to Tucson we both agreed that its been ‘one heck of a journey’ to pull off at the last minute, but we’re glad we’re doing it while we have the energy for it. The 60’s are the ‘GO-GO’ years and we are going!!!!
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