Here we are, on the road: We’re still in Peoria, AZ

March 24, 2013 Lorraine’s report

Happy Spring everyone! What a great way to start this time of renewal; spring is a time of new faith, hope and love. We have had a nice week with the warm sunny skies, the cooler nights are wonderful.

We have enjoyed our time here. It is nice to see friends from our olden days, (before Chuck retired). Jan and Glen are from those days. Glen hired on about 4-5 months after Chuck, so the things they lived through are really pretty amazing on how the refinery ran. They didn’t have all the refinery’s rules and regulations the refinery has now.

It was great to see Dave & Sandy, one more time before we head back west. They had us over for steak; Dave & Sandy did a very nice BBQ for us. Dave & Sandy, Chuck wanted you to know we feel so welcome to where ever you are, you make us feel very welcome. Thank you both. We will see you down the road.

As we end our time here, I must say Phoenix is pretty nice. We haven’t seen it all, but the people are pretty nice. Not sure where we will end up. but this area is pretty nice. We will have to think about this area.

Until next time…

Lorraine

3/24/13 Chuck’s report

This is our third week here so I shouldn’t have too much to write about for this week. But I can say we are still enjoying our stay and exploring the area.

Last Sunday we drove down to see our friends Glen and Jan at their place in Sun Lakes for a couple of months. They bought a house down there a few years ago and try to get to it as often and as long as they can. They are considering making this their primary home and use their motorhome when they leave and head back to Washington. We had a good visit with them and they showed us around their area, lots of places to see there also. Thanks Glen/Jan, we had a good time and good visit with you two.

Monday we decided to check out Sun City once again, lots to see there yet. This time we stopped by a realtor’s office to get some information. They gave us a good map and lots of information about the area, glad we stopped. Anyway, we continued with our search of the area and toured some of the clubhouses and other facilities. The realtor also told us about Sun City West, Sun City Grand and Happy Trials. West and Grand are more of the same, just newer phases and some changes like garages vs. car ports and such.

Happy Trails, however, is a bit different than just mobile homes and houses. Here you can keep you rig at your lot and build it up lots of different ways. You can put up just a cover, build a shed or casita or have an Arizona Room. These are more like a house but for some reason they can’t call them houses. We had to have a realtor drive us around and we stopped to look at some of the different type buildings and I must say, I can’t tell what the difference are between some of them.

But this is more like what we’ve been looking for, a single building with a place to keep the rig right there. Lots of places have RV ports with the RV completed covered too. And of course, like most places down here, there is a golf course with all these lots around the greens and such. This place definitely has potential for us for a long term place, just not in the works right now, too many places to see and things to do before we stop. I think if we were to buy a lot, we would feel compelled to visit every year instead of checking out other areas of the country.

On Wednesday we were invited to Dave and Sandy’s place in Cave Creek park again. They fixed us a nice steak meal and we had a good time with these good folks once again. We did play a couple of games of dice, not sure who won but who cares, we had a good time.

Thursday we had tickets to go to a Cactus League Baseball game here in Peoria. This is where the Seattle Mariners have their spring training, they actually share the park with the San Diego Padres. We wanted to see the Mariners and got the tickets a few days ago for an evening game. It’s getting too warm and sunny to sit outside for a 1 pm game, we were afraid we would get sunburned, ha. They have tickets from $60 for good seats down to bleacher seats for $12 or even $7 “seats” on the lawn outside the field. Glen suggested we may not like the lawn seating as they are all on a hill and it’s uncomfortable to sit on a hill that long. We decided to go for the bleacher seats, not real good seats but then we aren’t that big of fans of baseball anyway.

It was only about 15 minutes from our place to the ball park and the traffic and parking was pretty easy. We got to the park early enough that we could try to get autographs from the players when they came to the field for warm-up and such. However, the places to try to get autographs was very crowed with LOTS of kids so we didn’t try to get meet any players and get their autographs, left that to the kids.

But we did get to watch a good game. The Mariners broke out to a lead but by the 7th inning, the score was tied. Unfortunately for the home team, the Chicago Cubs scored 2 more runs in the 8th and 1 more in the 9th and won 7 to 4. Oh well, it was a good game and we’re glad we went. But even though we went with cheap tickets, the food and souvenirs were just as expensive as any ball park we’ve been too, $7.50 for a hot dog for example. But it was great to be outside at night and not have to worry about the cold or even dew.

Yesterday we decided to head out to the Mesa Marketplace, billed as the biggest swap meet in the Phoenix area. It took us about an hour to get there, the traffic wasn’t too bad as it was mostly freeway. I read somewhere that the Phoenix area is 100 miles across East to West and 40 miles from North to South. The area has really grown in the past 15 years, it’s now the 6th largest city in the US and has over 6 million people who call it home and that doesn’t count all of us snowbirds.

But the swap meet was crowed with lots of people, must be a popular place. We saw lots of stuff we might want for lawn decorations and such if we had a place down here. So if we ever did decided to buy, we know where we might be able to get some decorations and such, ha. We did find a few thing we could use now, however. In fact, Lorraine found the socks she’s been looking for at all the swap meets we’ve been to. She found some she liked three years ago at Quartzsite and hasn’t been able to find them again until yesterday.

The weather has been really nice, in the high 80s every day with the night time lows only dropping to the high 50s or low 60s. This isn’t too hard to take, glad the weather warmed up from a month ago when we were in Benson and Tucson. We’ve had a couple of days when it got to the 90s but I’m not complaining about that for sure.

We plan on leaving here sometime this week, probably on Wednesday. We are going to Yuma area for two nights so we can go over to Mexico and get some medicine and such. We then are planning on heading to Palm Springs 1000 Trails for awhile before we go back to our spot in the Bay area for our grand daughter’s birthday. Susy, tell Katie that Nana is on the way and will be there for her birthday!

We didn’t take too many pictures this week so it shouldn’t take too long to go through them and pick out which ones to add here. Guess I’ll do that and get this posted.

Flowers are blooming down here, should have taken more pictures of the different flowers but there are lots around, even roses are in bloom.