Snowbirds Getting Ready to Roost

We left Utah bright and early yesterday morning. Our destination was Parker, AZ, where we had left our Suzuki Samurai in the hands of Rod, a Suzuki mechanic wizard, after the 4 WD drive rally in Kingman. The goal was for him to figure out why the Samurai was such a dog on the highway--maximum speed was 60 mph, and that was downhill with a tailwind. No, I'm not exaggerating. When we left it there after the initial consultation, Rod had several guesses about what it would take to fix it; they ranged wildly in price--from replacing some do-hickeys in the carberator for around $200 to redoing all the gears for $1000. We were holding our breath, until word came that it was carberator thingeys and that the final bill would be $350 dollars. Whew! Funny how a $350 repair can sound cheap.

After Steve's back had been protesting for several hours, we decided to stop and spend the night in Needles, CA, about 70 miles from Parker. Needles isn't exactly a major tourist attraction, and we didn't think we'd have trouble finding a cheap motel, even with two dogs. Wrong! The two Best Westerns we tried first wanted $100 a night, even with the AARP discount. We then pulled into the Needles Inn, a little private place that didn't look too bad. They wanted $53, which seemed about $20 too high, but Steve's back was telling him that he needed to get out of the car NOW. The place was a dump. A clean dump, at least, but definitely in the "dump" category. They didn't bother even bolting the pictures to the wall--they knew nobody would want them. The place was under new management and had been recently repainted by what looked like a couple of junior high students. But at least it was clean, and close to a pretty good Mexican restaurant, which made Steve happy.

We picked up the Samurai in Parker this morning, and it got a true road test on the way to Prescott. True to Rod's word, it went 65 on the highway, only dropped to 60 when there was a headwind, and actually made it up a steep, curvy mountain road at a reasonable speed. We got to Prescott at around 3 p.m anfd transferred all the stuff we had brought from home from the Honda into the RV. We had a nice supper of corn chowder and spinach salad with my sister-in-law, Dawn,m and niece, Arin, and then just relaxed until bedtime. Tomorrow I'll make a Costco run and we'll head down to Sun City West to visit my folks and drop off the Honda.