Arizona, Willcox - Friday, April 13, 2018 - Grande Vista RV Park

Arizona, Willcox – Friday, April 13, 2018 – Grande Vista RV Park

We are spending the night at Grande Vista RV Park in Willcox, AZ.  This is a small family owned Good Sam RV Park.  They have 30 well maintained, level gravel sites.  Not much in the way of amenities, but we don’t need them.  We have a full service site with 50 amp service.  It’s a place we would come back to.  In fact, after looking at some of the sites to see in the area we plan on coming back through here next year and spending a few days.

We left Mesa about 9:30 this morning and it was starting to warm up nicely.  The last day we worked, Tuesday, it hit 100 degrees – a little too hot for me.  Allergy season is in full swing out here.  All of the plants and trees look wonderful and can be enjoyed as long as you remember to take your allergy medicine.

Hay is being cut.  There is a lot of it down in the fields now.  They bale hay a lot greener here than they do in the Midwest.  It is then stored in open-sided barns like this.

Corn is also coming up, but we have a feeling it is used for silage rather than grain.  The fields have to be flood irrigated, just like the hay fields.  Looks really weird to us Midwestern folks.

This is I-10 east, yesterday parts of it were shut down because of dust storms caused by high winds.  There isn’t much out here to hold the sand down.

Going to miss seeing the Saguaro cactus.

I missed the “picture of the day”.  We stopped at a Pilot truck stop to fill up with fuel and to get a Subway sandwich.  While we were filling up Greg noticed that a hose for our tankless water heater was leaking.  After filling up we pulled into the truck parking lot to eat lunch and then Greg decided to walk over to the Freightliner Service Center next door to get a new hose and connection.  I waited for him in the coach.  After a while I looked in the driver’s side mirror and saw him coming back.  He was at about the end of the coach and “something” was coming up on him pretty fast.  He was unaware of his follower.  He rounded the front of the coach and was in the door just as a “lady” made it to the front of the coach and was motioning for him to let her in.  I’m using the term “lady” loosely.  We stop several times a year at truck stops and this is the first time we have encountered one of the “ladies” who sometimes frequent them.  We noted that she had her ratty bedroll and probably everything else she owned with her so she was ready to travel.  When Greg finally noticed her I think he locked the door.  At any rate we got a good laugh – going to have to keep a closer eye on him, somebody might carry him off.

On the road again we saw a portion of the Chiricahua Mountains.  This area is known for its balancing rocks.  Seeing the Chiricahua National Monument is part of the plan for next year.  The little black box in the first picture is our EZ Pass toll road monitor.

In the park we came across our first wildlife of the year.  No kidding, we don’t even see bugs, not even flies at the resort where we stay during the winter.

We decided to support the local community by eating in historic downtown Willcox at Big Tex BBQ.  The restaurant is inside a couple of old train cars.  BBQ was okay, probably won’t be a repeat.  The brisket and pulled pork was good, the ribs weren’t very tender.

Before we ate, we did a wine tasting at Keeling Schaefer winery (the sun was too bright to get a good picture).  I was a little buzzed after the wine tasting so we decided to not visit any of the other wineries offering tastings in the area.  We did get a nice bottle of white wine that is sweet like we prefer it.

Rex Allen and Marty Robbins both have museums in Willcox.  We got there too late to tour them today.  But, we did get a picture of the Rex Allen statue.  For those of you that aren’t into old cowboy movies, he was one of the Silver Screen Cowboys which included Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

This old train depot is now the Willcox City Hall.  Note the round cement structure underneath the “Willcox” sign.  This is an old phone booth, it looked at little claustrophobic compared to the glass sided ones we used growing up.