Over and Out

We're home! As usual, I kind of lost interest in blogging towards the end of the trip. Or else got preoccupied with the logistics of it all. We packed up last weekend and left the Ajo area to spend the weekend with our son, Chris, in Tempe. We parked the Palms in his driveway and hung out with him and his new girlfriend, Sharon, all weekend. Low key, but lots of fun. We went to a restaurant called RigaTony's for dinner Friday night; it was wonderful--a small, local chain similar to Olive Garden, but even better. Saturday night, Chris hosted a barbeque for friends, and we spent the afternoon shopping for ingredients for the skewered chicken tenders Sharon was going to make. Some of them were fairly exotic (have you heard of galangal--I hadn't!), so Chris took us to LeeLee's. It's an Asian/international market in Chandler, and if they don't have it, you don't need it, and it probably doesn't exist anyway. Sharon was moved almost to tears when she found the specific brand of lime pickle that she loves and hasn't seen since she moved from New York to Tucson several years ago. The produce section had every imaginable and unpronounceable vegetable, fruit, and melon known to man; the meat department, along with familiar and unfamiliar cuts of meat and whole frozen fish, featured a wall of fish tanks holding sea bass, tilapia, and catfish. Theoretically, you could pick out the exact fish you wanted, and they'd net it, kill, it, and clean it for you before you left the store.

After Chris's, we drove to Sun City West and stayed with my parents. We had made an appointment at Al's RV Service in Glendale, about 12 miles away, to get the levelers fixed. Al's is one of the two places in Arizona that has a certified HWH master mechanic (Utah has none!). They quickly determined that the levelers failed for one of two reasons--a bad computer chip in the control panel or one in the motherboard, both quick fixes once you had the very expensive part. They called HWH in Iowa, who, amazingly, said they would cover it, even though it was out of warranty. The only thing we had to pay was $45 to have the parts overnighted from Iowa to Al's. Once the parts arrived, it took Al five minutes to determine which chip was bad and another fifteen to unscrew the control panel and pop in the new chip.

We took two days to drive home, staying at our favorite Cedar Pockets Campground in the Virgin River Gorge, about halfway. Because we were coming back to winter, Steve wanted to avoid as many mountains as possible, so we went home the Las Vegas way rather than the Flagstaff way we came down in January. The only bad thing about this route is having to drive the freeway through Las Vegas, always nerve-wracking and jammed with fast-moving traffic. Steve consulted some maps, and found a road that wound around the west side of Lake Mead and dumped us out on the north side of Vegas near I-15, but avoiding the downtown Vegas freeways. The "short-cut" was a very scenic, quiet, good two-lane highway. We will definitely use this route again.

We came home to snow flurries, with a fair amount of the white stuff on the ground. We've started the tedious business of unpacking. Not sure where or when our next trip will be. We're expecting our second grandchild in mid-July, so any summer trip would have to be after that. We'll keep in touch.