Sunday Oct 20, 2024 Bisbee to Prescott

 

It’s been a while since our last camping trip, Colorado in July. I took the van out for a ride, which I try to do once a month or so. The heater likes to be run every month or so but I forgot that it also likes more than a quarter tank of gas in the tank. I tried to run the heater but it locked me out. This happened a couple of years ago and I had to cycle the power on it but it didn’t work this time, so I found and pulled the fuses for the heater to cycle power and magically the heater worked. I also filled the tank up before running it of course.

We are going to Sacramento to see the grand kids and will go via Prescott and Las Vegas since Deb has never been there. Then we’ill take the “loneliest road in America”, Rt 50 all the way across Nevada.

We packed up everything, clothes and food, toothbrush etc., loaded the van at the end of the driveway, put everything away down on the street and then we were off.

It felt good to be on the road again and today we are all highway, which is fine because Phoenix is really busy. We were going to get breakfast sandwiches and coffee at McD’s but they stopped breakfast 10 minutes before we got there so we got a Subway sub since it was 11:00 already. It’s Sunday so Tucson traffic was easy, and then the long stretch on I-10 to Phoenix. Google re-routed us a couple of times and we did not see any slowdowns all the way through Phoenix. Thanks again Google!

Then north on I-17 to Prescott. It was only in the 70’s in Phoenix and Tucson and the temperature dropped another 10-15 degrees as we climbed to Prescott that’s at 5300 ft elevation.

The road into Prescott is really really busy. They have all the chain stores out here which must be their “strip”. We had heard that it was exploding in population and that appears to be the case. We went to the downtown where the old city is and it was less commercial. Prescott is the county seat of Yavapi County (twice the population of our Cochise County}, and their courthouse is indeed twice the size of ours, at least. We walked up the famous Whiskey Row and checked out all the shops. Gave a dollar to a Santa that claims he makes Xmas stockings for Vets (looked legit) so maybe he does and maybe he had enough to buy a bottle. Nice guy either away.

Prescott has two colleges, Yavapi Community College and Prescott College so the town had a lot of younger folks wandering around. We were told to go to Bill’s Pizza place (Santa disagreed) and we split a large salad and a small pizza.

Then we drove the three miles to White Spar Campground which was ⅔ full with pit toilets for $14. A nice quiet night. Tomorrow Las Vegas!