Arizona, Phoenix - Friday, November 7, 2014 - Phoenix International Raceway

It was 11:30 last night before we got home.  I was too tired to write the blog at that point.  Thursday morning we won two tickets to see the truck race.  I wanted to see the race, but I wasn’t too happy about having to go through Phoenix on the interstate to get there.  Greg found another way which turned out to be a great ride – I was happy and it gave us the opportunity to see a lot of the area where we are living.  I’ve given up on trying to take pictures while we are moving, but I sure could have gotten a lot of shots of beautiful flowers and trees in bloom.  Here in the resort where we are staying there are lots of orange trees just loaded with fruit.  They are so pretty they almost look artificial.  I’ll get pictures of those in a day or so when we’ve had time to walk around and see the sites here.

We passed a lot of cotton fields that look like they are ready to pick.  I never thought about Arizona as a cotton growing state.  We also went through an area where I think alfalfa was planted, but not like they plant it in Indiana.  It is planted in fields that have dams in them like rice fields.  Our assumption is that they flood the fields every so often because the alfalfa is beautiful bright green.  There were huge open sided barns filled with bales of hay.  I guessed each barn might hold 8 semi loads of hay, Greg thinks it is much more than that.  I don’t know how many barns we saw, but there were a lot of them. 
Phoenix International Raceway is celebrating their 50^th year this year.

 

 

See all those stairs to the right, we climbed all of them but the last flight.  Our seats were great, but those stairs were a trial J.  We do really well with walking distances, but stairs are still an issue after a couple of flights.

We walked through a few of our favorite displays after having a sandwich for lunch.

These are our seats, right at the end of pit lane.  We are right between turns one and two.  We can see the start/finish line over to the left under the white building in the stands.  We were in the shade all day.  Weather was sunny and in the mid-80’s.  Great seats, great weather.

The spotters for the drivers are just above us.  They had to walk up all the stairs.

“Rattlesnake Hill” is in the distance.  I think they said this is called Memorial Hill in the list of historic places.

Lots of people setting up their spots on the hill.  This is between turns 3 and 4 and is in the sun all day.

 

We got to the track in time to see Nationwide and Sprint Cup practice.

Trucks were going through their pre-race inspections right in front of us.

 

 

Greg says he thinks RV parking on the 3^rd turn runs about $3,000.  Needless to say, you won’t be seeing any pictures from that view.

There is another hill behind turn 3 but they evidently don’t want people up there.  Trying to protect those big spenders below the hill I guess.

Here we are with our radio headphones.  Daughter Desira and Son-in-law Dan had these from when they followed the NASCAR races.  They gave them to us before we went on the road to fulltime.  This is the first time we’ve had the opportunity to use them.  They worked great.  They blocked out most of the race noise, allowed us to talk to each other, we could hear what the drivers and their teams were talking about and we could listen to the television commentary on the race.  Thanks guys, these really made the race more enjoyable.  Greg is being very serious here, he was concentrating on trying to take the "selfie".

We did have a little problem with the microphones, each one had lost a very small screw. We found the screws in the bag we carry them in.  But we didn’t have a screwdriver – hair clip to the rescue.

 

 

Someone had a bigger problem than we did.  Never did hear what was burning but it didn’t look good for quite a while.

 

 

Sprint Cup qualifying was also yesterday.  We really enjoyed that.  We are now watching the Nationwide race on television and tomorrow we’ll watch the Cup race.  I makes it even more interesting when we can relate to the track after having been there.

 

 

People who had RV’s parked in the infield had some ring side seats for Nationwide qualifying.  I’m not sure I’d feel good about having that many people on top of our RV.

 

 

This is a view of the track.  When I took this it was early and there weren’t many people in the stands.  For Sunday’s race every seat is sold out in the stands and on Rattlesnake Hill.  The parking lot is just full of RVs.

Truck race is about to start.  Just before the drivers got into their trucks the lights went out.  It wasn’t just a racetrack problem, the entire area was without electricity.  Every sports venue imaginable has something big going on in Phoenix this weekend, evidently sucking up too much electricity.

 

 

This is the track with lights on.

This is the track with lights off.  The screen in the center evidently has its own generator.  The moon coming up was beautiful.

The track personnel kept trying to get all the lights going with generator power, but as soon as all the lights came up, they went off again.  The race was delayed over and hour and a half.  Once the race got started there was a wreck before they even got to turn one that spilled a lot of oil so there was another long, long delay with lots of oil dry being spread and swept up.  When they started again there was another wreck.  I think they said 30 of the first 40 laps were run under yellow, a lot of them down pit road to stay out of the oil dry.

Eventually everything settled down and they got in most of the race before the lights went out again about 20 laps from the finish.  We left at that point.  We found the bike in the parking lot and made it home safe and sound.

Arizona, Mesa - Thursday, November 6, 2014 - Val Vista Villages RV Resort

We attended the resort information meeting this morning.  It was sponsored this week by Camping World.  They provided coffee and donuts, plus a lot of raffle prizes.  It was worth getting up early.

We won two tickets to the NASCAR Truck Race tomorrow.  The only downside is that in order to get to the track we have to go back through Phoenix, the traffic is horrible.  I told Greg when we went through the first time that I didn’t want to come back through--that didn’t hold up very long.

We spent the afternoon doing paperwork of one kind or another.  We had to go to the food services office a few blocks away from the resort where we are staying to fill out all of our employment paperwork.  Then when we came home we called the insurance company to get our claim started on the damage done in yesterday’s accident.  We are hoping that we can wait to get the damage repaired until we get back to Indiana in July next year.  We’ll be going to northern Indiana to get the roof fixed anyway and it would just make sense to get it all fixed at one time.

We stopped by the Cactus Grill to talk to the workamper manager and to pick up our work shirts.  We report to work at 10:00 on Monday morning.  We’ll be working all day on Monday getting oriented in everything that goes on.  We will each be working 12 hours per week in exchange for our lot rental and utilities.  We normally have $1,000 a month allocated for those expenses so it will be a nice savings.

A resort representative came by with a welcome gift.  You can tell we are in the southwest, it includes an enchilada soup mix, salsa and jalapeño cheddar popcorn.  Those wine glasses are glass, they don’t know it yet but their lifespan is short with us.

 

 

The weather here during the day was mid-80’s with sunshine.  It is supposed to be like that for the rest of the week, with lows in the mid-60’s at night.  The humidity ranges from 15% to 35%.  I’m going to be going through a lot of lotion or else I’ll look like a prune we are used to humidity well over 55%.

This is our home for the next five months.  From what we have seen of the resort so far it looks like we are really going to enjoy it.

 

 

Arizona, Mesa - Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - Val Vista Villages RV Resort

We left the little town of Wikieup (population 400) early this morning thinking it would be a short trip into Mesa – we expected to be here around noon.  The scenery changed some from Nevada, it is greener and there are bigger cacti.

 

 

One area along state road 93 had a lot of mountains that looked like precisely stacked boulders.

Still lots of mountains.

There was a sign showing this was the Joshua Tree Forest-Arizona Scenic Highway.  I believe these are the Joshua trees.

I might mention that if you are planning to travel state road 93 between Kingman and Phoenix there is nothing between Wikieup and Wickenburg which is about 60 miles – so make sure your gas tank is full.

Just a little after 11:00 our day took a turn we weren’t expecting.  We had stopped at Wal-Mart for a few groceries and were headed to top off the fuel tank when we heard a loud crash.  My first thought was “darn, what did I forget to secure that was that big”.  We were turning right, we were in the outside of the two right turn lanes.  A lady in a pickup truck was in the turn lane next to us and for some reason she came into our lane.  Luckily, Greg took pictures before the police arrived that showed her location.  She was ticketed thanks to the pictures.  Unfortunately, we still need to deal with the damage that was done.  There are some creases and scuffs along three of the basement doors, one of the door latches is sprung.  One of the awing supports is also broken.  We’ll get it fixed, just a hassle we weren’t expecting.  The good news is no one was hurt.

 

 

 

 

We got to Val Vista Villages with barely enough time to get into our site and over to the office to get checked in before it closed at 4:00.  We’ll have to find out tomorrow what our work assignments are going to be.