Wednesday, April 9, 2014

AZ 303 - How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count The Ways

Well, really there is only one.  No traffic!  We left Destiny Phoenix RV Resort at about 11:15am.  Turned left out of the park, and followed the N. Citrus Avenue detour route a few miles and right on to 303.  If you can tolerate the reduced speeds of 35mph and 45mph in certain spots, the rest of the road is completed and wide open.  I really do not like the traffic (or rather the drivers) in and around Phoenix.  I grew up in Seattle, and traffic itself is not a big deal for me, but the aggressiveness and rudeness and inattention of the people behind the wheel of vehicles drives me nuts.  This was such a nice and easy drive.  It connects right up to I-17 at about the Carefree Highway.  Easy peasy.

The drive up I-17 to Camp Verde wasn't bad.  There are a few portions of that freeway where you are climbing up and traffic gets snarled with slow moving trucks, but all in all, it was good.   We arrived at Thousand Trails Verde Valley about 1:15pm.

If you are not familiar with Thousand Trails parks, you make your reservation ahead of time, but when you arrive at the park, you drive around, pick a spot and then let the office know which spot you chose.  This park is very spread out with 5 sections of camp spots, called A, B, C, H and M.  Why they skipped D, E, F, and G, and then I, J, K and L, I do not know.  Future planned camp sites would be my guess, but it could be the same reasoning my 4 year old grandson uses when he counts - he doesn't like 4, 5 and 6, and will often just skip from 3 to 7.  Go figure.  At any rate, we drove through the park twice looking at spots.  I'm not a big fan of the lay out of camp sites.  There are many sites that are very close together.  They share a power/utility pole so the slides on the non-entry side of one rig is less than 3 feet from the slides on the non-entry side of the next rig.

We found a single spot, not sharing a pole, and we have a nice grassy (Arizona desert grassy) spot between us and the next rig.  We are facing south to north, so in the morning, we have shade outside our door.  In the evening, the shade is on the other side.  Yesterday afternoon, we drug our chairs around the far side and enjoyed the shade in this 90 degree weather.  Granted, sitting near our sewer connection wasn't my first pick, but I turned my chair so it was behind me.  I had a nice view, peaking through the rigs across the road from us, of the trees and beyond.  I'm enjoying all the hummingbirds flitting about.

Our neighbors in the site next to us took off this morning.  They were headed to San Diego County.  I was telling them about the 303, and how they could easily take that, and then catch the highway in Buckeye, AZ that would take them down to I-8/Yuma.  He said he planned to take I-17 down to the 101 in Phoenix, and on to Gila Bend to pick up I-8.  I'm not sure why, with 303 available, one would choose to go through Phoenix, but to each his/her own.  At any rate, Kim's aunt and uncle are on their way here today, and fingers crossed, this site next to us will still be available.  No saving sites - darn it!

Park pictures in the next posting.

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