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Kodachrome Basin State Park

Last January we made reservations for Kodachrome State Park in southern Utah. Spring is the most popular time, and reservations are truly necessary in this popular spot. We were able to get a lovely site with full hookups for only $30 a night, pretty good! There was no cell service, so we kept having to go to town to check on emails and texts to deal with selling the house.We had some friends join us, and we had a lovely time. I am going to add a lot of pictures, so be prepared.

Sorry for the antenna, but this is the general look of the area. Lots of rolling hills and mountains with juniper and sage.

While this part of the country is know for its red rocks, there are some big white bluffs too. Much of the white is clay, and it was mined extensively in the area.

This is a view of the area from the scenic byway Highway 12. We took an entire day to drive the 70 or so miles to and from the town of Boulder. Absolutely gorgeous.

On another day we went to Bryce Canyon National Park. It is high enough in elevation that it has lines instead of junipers, and snow was on the ground above 8000’.

View from a lookout at Bryce.

Nice arch at Bryce.

We also drove a rough dirt road, Cottonwood Canyon Road, to Grosvenor Arch. This is a well signed BLM site with picnic tables, a toilet, and a paved walkway that went most of the way to the arch. It was quite impressive – a full double arch that just opened up before you. Quite cathedral – like.

Kodachrome Basin is definitely off the beaten path, but well worth a detour. Mostly full hookup sites, 50amp electrical service, with a few no hookup sites available. All are reservable, and you need to reserve if you want a site. Almost all the sites will accommodate a big motorhome or fifth wheel with ease. Our friends had an electric site for the first 2 nights, but had to move to a non-electric on the third night. We shared cooking duties. She made sloppy joes with a wonderful fresh salad on her cooking night, and I made baby back ribs in the Instant Pot with pan fried potatoes, onion, and peppers on my night. Yum.

Too much going on to post!

Well the house in Utah has sold, and we have bought a house in Iowa. The prices in the Salt Lake City area are quite high compared to Iowa, so we were able to get a really nice new construction place with better features than the one we sold. About the same size, but with granite countertops, a three car garage, quality appliances, and just all-around better construction. Of course this means getting a 5 bedroom, 2 living areas, and a huge sewing room packed and moved. Anyone who has done can agree it is a terrible job, but it is done as of 2 days ago. I have had hardly any time to do anything fun, but I did get some sewing done. Here is the baby quilt for my niece’s upcoming baby.

I like the Irish Chain design. She wanted something understated, and she likes grays and whites. The white is a bright white Moda and the gray is Moda Grunge which is shot with streaks of white. I used a pale icy blue for the quilting. I am particularly proud of my binding on this one.

I also got a bit of embroidery done on some burp cloths.

We are currently living at the KOA in Salt Lake City. Remarkably quiet and pretty nice. We much prefer staying in our travel trailer to staying in a hotel, and we need to stay here until after the Hamilton show we have tickets to on Wednesday. Then it will be off to Iowa.

Oh, and we did take a trip to Kodachrome Basin State Park a couple of weeks ago. I will do a separate post for that.

House for sale

We actually we’re able to get the house up for sale, beginning last Thursday. We decided to head to Iowa to look for a house while the Open Houses and initial showings were happening. It is a real pain to try to live in a house that has half of your furniture and has to be kept super clean all the time, so leaving was a good idea. There were a number of people who came to see the house, and we have one offer so far. Expect more to arrive, and we will evaluate the offers on Wednesday. We also found a couple of houses we are interested in, but we are waiting to put offers in until the Utah house has a signed contract. We did hypertension pre-approved, so it should be relatively painless.

After four nights in hotels, I really am looking forward to getting back to my house. If I have to travel, I want to do it in my own RV!

Oh, and do you want to see a clean sewing room? It will never look this nice again. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1981-S-1500-W_Woods-Cross_UT_84087_M21701-55491#photo15

I love the stained concrete floors. They look great, and they are so easy to clean. They were a pain to add since we couldn’t stay in the house for 24 hours while they were being worked on. I think it was worth it in the end though.

Pulled the trigger

We got the proposals for buying the motorhome, and we chose to go with a bid from Sherman RV Center in Sherman, Mississippi. They are near the Tiffin factory, and the salesman we had said they have more on order now than they have ever had. It will probably be 16 weeks until we can pick up the coach though. We are instead frantically cleaning, sorting, and packing the house. We had a “stager” come in to tell us how much furniture to remove, how many books should be in the book cases, even where to place the rugs. The biggest problem is my sewing studio. Luckily she says I can keep all the machines and thread, but I have to clean up the shelves and miscellaneous stuff. Sigh.

We also pulled the trigger on a new vehicle. We decided to get a Jeep Grand Cherokee Trailhawk. It is one of the few that can be flat towed behind the motorhome. We found a local dealer with a couple of units advertised at a good price. We went in, did a test drive, and struck a deal. Of course they didn’t want to honor the deal, but we convinced them otherwise when we got up to leave. So far I am very pleased with it. It has all kinds of safety features that are lovely. It is comfortable too, so we are going to take it back to Iowa with a load of canoes, snow thrower, lawn mower, propane bottles, and some other miscellaneous stuff. We will get a P.O. box and we have already rented a storage u it. We will also look at houses with a Realtor. We might even get lucky and make an offer contingent on getting the Utah house sold. I am crossing my fingers!

Here is a not very good picture of the Jeep. I don’t have one when it is outside since it is snowing. I love the bright red color!

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Big changes coming

For the last three weeks Kevin and I have been thinking about the timing of selling our house in Utah, buying a house in Iowa (home of most kids and all grandkids), and buying a motorhome (required for long snowbird trips because, well, Iowa). We pulled the trigger last night. The Utah house is listed for sale with the first publicity and open house on 1 March. I am sending price requests to some big Tiffin motorhome dealers for a new 37PA motorhome, and we are checking out Realtors in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It isn’t as fast as it might seem, because we had been talking about the options for over six months, but it almost takes my breath away. The house timing is good. The Salt Lake City area market is fantastic right now for sellers, with multiple offers and top dollar being common. The market in Cedar Falls is solid, not spectacular, and homes are available. Rates are probably heading up, hurting buyers and sellers, so we might as well do it now. The motorhome has a floor plan very livable for us, and we can swing the price. So, off to the real work of clean up, paint, stain, and decluttering. We have a new housekeeper candidate coming to give us a quote (I was ready to fire my old ones anyway), another one with a quote in the next few days, plus a “staging expert” today. We bought boxes, and we are already packing things like clothes and stuff we know needs to be out of the house. Luckily we have a big storage unit to put stuff in. It is still rather breath taking.

Military bases plus quilting

Odd title, but we did a couple of quite different things today. First we went to Fort Huachuca and it’s fascinating Buffalo Soldier Museum. Buffalo Soldiers were what African American soldiers were known as before integration of the Armed Forces after World War II. Supposedly the curly hair reminded the Native Americans of buffalo (bison). It was a good thing the museum was good because it took a very long time to get a pass for the post. It took my driver’s license and a long questionnaire, followed by a criminal background check and military records check before I got the pass, about 30 or 45 minutes total. While most of the post was very modern, I took a few pictures of the older part because I like the history.

EC965990-E2F9-40E8-A519-4A1C997DA4E8 — A duplex housing a Major and a Command Sergeant Major.

9C4C0D2B-24E3-4B4E-BB2B-887DD7FFE8C8 — Just looking into the distance across the old parade ground.

D02EC9F5-3E07-42E9-A011-9C98F5618541 — An old mission-style building.

72372CDC-0CF4-4EB8-A9BD-1EF4DFEDD482 — Old barracks now made into offices.

We did exciting things like laundry at the campground, and I got my latest Quilts for Kids project completed. I am pretty pleased with it. I did the quilting on my Bernina sitting at the dinette table, something much harder to do than using the quilting machine at home.

2B069882-93B1-456E-947D-80139E7AE5E4 The design is called “I Spy” because of all the different fabrics. I used a dark blue thread for the meander quilting. I probably should have used yellow, but I didn’t have any nor did I want to go to the store, so blue it was. It feels nice to get this one done. Next I need to work on the microwave bowl holders with the cute fabric I bought here, but we are leaving this campground tomorrow. I like the area, but the campsite is not nice at all. There isn’t room for the truck, so we have to park it in the overflow area, and it is quite inconvenient. We will probably head some place north of Phoenix for tomorrow night. Thursday and Friday we will be at Willow Beach below Lake Mead. A full hookup campsite! Of course that assumes the Government doesn’t shit down again.

Oh, and tonight I made baby back ribs in the Instant Pot again. Yum, yum! You notice no pictures; they didn’t last long enough.

Ghost towns and tourist towns

We decided to visit some old mining towns today – Courtland and Gleeson. They aren’t too far from Huachuca City or Tombstone, our ultimate destination. Courtland had obviously been a big mining district. There were tailing piles and mining roads scattered across the hillsides.

4E9E7A97-A68A-4215-AF84-64B328CE688F — Lots of rock buildings (sorry for the bad lighting)

ABA2B853-EE31-48CB-9E0C-1B7CD00F663D — Adobe buildings too

772D8EDF-1F8E-40F2-A83F-9D60D83380BB — This one looked scary!

AB77E2B7-02FA-4437-9BE5-FAE3A9A61FA5 — Distant views

122EAC6B-36A5-4A03-BDF7-E2607C9DDAFD — Yet more buildings, or at least their footings

300EDC3C-5DE3-4705-BBB8-EAC1F582B6E5 — Mine tailings. This one is still active. See the tiny white spec?

Now for Gleeson. Not as many pictures because a number of people still live in this community. There were even a number of mailboxes.

F5B4C86B-BDF8-412D-A619-51652BDD4C26 — This was a big building

17C0EF8F-3F35-4388-8D41-5B8981349CC2 — Leftovers of the mill and headframe

439927B0-C87F-4237-9D5A-AE1E52E9EE71 — Way at the top of a hill. Maybe a church?

After the ghost towns we headed to Tombstone. We picked a great day without many visitors since most people must have been planning on football. Lots of neat old buildings plus lots of relatively tasteful tourist shops. I was pleasantly surprised. We did take a stagecoach ride though. The driver/narrator was a hoot and deserved his tip at the end.

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This evening I pressed and sandwiched the Quilts for Kids project. I even got it quilted on my Bernina! It was the first time I have done free motion quilting on an entire quilt on the Bernie, and it went pretty well. Of course the quilt wasn’t big, about 40×45”. I will post a completed picture when I get the binding on.

Oh, and the Eagles won the game.

Huachuca City, AZ

After we left Quartzsite we headed east to Huachuca, just outside of Sierra Vista. We are staying at Mountain View RV Park. I would recommend this park for long term folks, but it is not nice at all for short timers! The first spot they put is had the sewer connection underneath the trailer. The manager was quite put out we weren’t willing to crawl underneath the trailer to get to our (paid for) facilities. With bad grace they moved us to “the only other site they had” which was very narrow and had two trees that keep us from parking on our site. Note that of today (Saturday) there is still a pull through site available plus numerous back ins. At least the place is quiet.

Yesterday we did laundry and went to a lovely little quilt shop called The Squirrel’s Nest. I got some cut fabric for microwave fabric bowls.

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One cover will be the bowl-kokopelli fabric and the other will have the quail on both sides. I love mountain quail! I also got fabric for two baby quilts. One is for my niece and her upcoming baby boy (the white and gray) and the other is for a son of one of my sons (the cream and red). I am going to make both the same pattern, an Irish Chain.

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Today we tried tried to visit Bisbee, AZ, but we couldn’t find any parking. We drove through town three times, checking out the public lots plus on street parking, and nothing was available. I can’t walk for blocks just to get to the historic area. We were both disappointed, so we decided to drive to Tucson to see the RV show they had there. (Yes, I know that makes no sense.)

We decided to actively start looking at options for selling the house, buying a house, and buying a motorhome. First step was to talk to a Realtor friend in Utah to see whether the market is as hot there as I have heard. Spoiler: it is! He was practically begging us to list, and he said he had folks who could help us get things ready to sell. There just aren’t very many houses on the market right now, and he needs listings. He also gave us some good recommendations on how to juggle the finances for house and motorhome. Ummm. Now we have to get serious! Our current favorite coach is a Tiffin 37PA. We plan on ordering a new one from the factory, so we need to finalize options. Lots to do!

More about the Quartzsite trip

Warning, this is a long post. I really should have posted more frequently, but the data on my cell phone has been very slow until a lot of people left.

While we did go to the Big Tent, we have also done other activities in the area. Last week we took a trip to Castle Dome, a mining museum and ghost town about an hour and a a half a way. The first 45 miles are highway, but the last 8 or 9 are washboard gravel so it was slow going. The area is well worth the trip though. Here is why the community and mining district got its name.

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The builidngs came from various mining camps in the area with only a few being original to the town itself. One of those was the hotel.

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The place is just full of wonderful history.

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The mining continued through the 1950s, but I didn’t take pictures of the later period exhibits. Down the road a bit they have a walking tour past a number of old mines. They range from hand dug pits 30’ deep cut by the early Spanish explorers to sophisticated hard rock mines last worked in the 1950s and 60s that are hundreds of feet long with multiple levels. The area was know for gold, silver, and lead with some copper too.

We took a trip down to the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge southwest of Quartzsite on the Colorado River. When the river was channelized for irrigation purposes in the 1960s, the refuge was established to mitigate some of the loss of wetlands. We drove down on a dirt road that mostly edged along the river. It had been washed out completely in a few spots. Most of them had been fixed recently (the bulldozer tracks were still fresh), but we did have one spot where we had to detour. I would not recommend this route for passenger cars. We returned via a hard surface road that went to Blythe that would be suitable for passenger cars. The refuge looks like a classic dry desert until you round a corner on the auto tour and see (and hear) this. You will have to click to see the video, but it is worth it to turn the sound up.

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Besides the thousands of ducks, geese, and pelicans in the water, we also saw a few dozen sandhill cranes standing in the alfalfa fields grown for their use.

We also took a trip to the Desert Bar northeast of Parker, about 45 miles from Quartzsite. This is a classic place, completely off the grid, open only on weekends from October to April. All kinds of bar and grill food – burgers, pulled pork, chicken fingers, etc. – plus a full bar and live music. The road is very rocky and rough. A passenger can would have to be careful, but it is doable.

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14CC2CA4-2257-42BF-9A78-7A6AE1DA658D — The band the day we went

50599FEF-6D84-4078-ADF2-8A5CCC84514C — Love the views

1366E67F-71D2-4ACF-B3DC-F05EFDE035B1 — Nice view from the open air bathroom (the stalls have doors)

A7308B1B-9807-44DD-B51E-0FAA76403670 — It takes a lot of solar to keep this place going

DBE04F31-288A-4694-B118-1F455D9C0548 — A popular viewpoint

We now intend on staying here until Thursday. Early Wednesday morning there will be a lunar eclipse, so we decided to stay another day.

Oh, and a few housekeeping items. There is a really nice Albertson’s in Blythe, CA about 20 miles away. Quartzsite only has a couple of convenience stores that carry a (very) few groceries. We did laundry on a day trip to Yuma at Plaza Coin Laundry, a very nice spot. We ate lunch at Ronnie’s Pizza. Great pizza at a real hole in the wall place. I did make ribs again, and this time I took a picture before we ate. E1625881-BF04-47C2-A38D-4F4BB68808AB

For the traditional Saturday potluck I made my tried and true green chili chicken enchiladas, made New Mexican style (layered) in the Dutch Oven. They were a hit. I always feel a bit guilty when I get complements on them since they are sooooo easy.

Quartzsite with 200,000 of my closest friends

We drove from HB on Friday to the desert south of Quartzsite, AZ. This is the snowbird capital of the world for a week or so during their RV and Big Tent Show each winter. The rest of the winter the desert is still popular with snowbirds, especially if they can dry camp. For a $40 fee the BLM will let you camp on their land for 14 days. There is access to water, a sanitary dump, and trash bins. They also have a $180 fee for those who want to stay for the season – as long as 7 months. I can’t imagine doing that, but this is a great place for a couple of weeks. We met up with friends from RVForum.net, and we have daily Happy Hour get togethers plus a potluck planned for today. Nice folks.

Saturday was the first day of the Big Tent Show, and it is a BIG tent (picture from last year).

We should have waited. The show was dreadfully crowded, and parking was a mess. Kevin kindly dropped me off near the door and parked a 5 minute walk away. Did I mention it was crowded? We still haven’t bought anything but two USB charging cords, funnel cakes, fry bread, and ice cream. The last three were over three separate trips, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it looks in writing. We finally figured out the best time to go was mid afternoon, around 2 or 3. Much less crowded, and it is a great time for funnel cakes (a not so secret vice of mine).

The specific area we are in is called La Posa Tyson Wash. The surface is mostly gravel so it isn’t hard to get around on. We have a number of OTA TV channels plus my Verizon phone gets good data service except when everyone else hits it by mid morning and again in the evening. We bought a 14 day pass, and we intend on staying until,after the lunar eclipse next week. When I mentioned the 200,000 other people here, I might have both understated and overstated the impact. Yes, there are actually more than 200,000 people here in the desert, but they are mostly spread out quite a ways. It feels much less crowded than a state park, and if you want solitude you could find it. We intended to camp with a group so we are in an area about 200 x 75 yards with 25 rigs or so.

BAA9A014-8234-4DD5-BF7A-E4E2ABD6EDE7 — Sunrise at Quartzsite

We also continued to look at Class A RVs. My latest favorite is a Tiffin RED 37PA. Nice kitchen, good storage, big bath and closets, plus big water and waste tanks so we can continue to dry camp easily. This one is certainly in the running. We also looked at about 10 other coaches, and nothing else hit our fancy.