After arriving at Gareth’s Uncle’s place in Scottsdale we joined them for a meal of fish tacos at a favorite local place that they go to regularly. The next day we didn’t do a whole lot, spent some time doing laundry and cleaning up all the dead bugs on the front of the motorhome. In the afternoon we borrowed their Jeep and went for a little drive north of Scottsdale to an area known as Cave Creek.
On Saturday, Gareth joined his Uncle and Aunt on a visit to the Scottsdale farmers market to stock up on supplies for the coming week. Upon their return we hopped on the motorcycle and headed east into the mountains, completing our journey at a place called Tortilla Flat. It was extremely hot and sunny, well over 30 degrees celcius. We enjoyed a dip in the pool when we got back.
The next day we said our goodbyes and headed North to a Thousand Trails campground in the beautiful Verde Valley. It was about 45 minutes away from Sedona, which we had visited before. The first day we went for a little ride up to the neat little mining town of Jerome, which we had also visited on our first trip to Arizona around 2002-2003. Not much had changed… The next day we rode up to Sedona and beyond, up to the Oak Creek Vista which was very scenic.
We stopped for an hour or two at Slip Rock state park and Gareth took a dip in the cold mountain stream.
We turned around after going through a series of switchbacks to a lookout at the top of the mountain. On the way back we enjoyed a stroll around Sedona.
On our last day in Verde Valley we went on a scenic train ride that went about 2 hours north of Cottonwood to an abandoned mining town. It was a nice change of pace to let someone else do the driving and see something you couldn’t get to by road.
We had originally planned to spend an extra day at Verde Valley but decided to move on so as to avoid some busier destinatons and the weekend, a difficult combo for finding campsites.
After a brief stopover in Flagstaff and another stop to check out the really cool cliff dwellings at Walnut Canyon National Monument just outside Flagstaff.
We stopped for the night at Homolovi state park just outside the town of Winslow, AZ, memorialized in the Eagles song “Take It Easy” and part of the historic Route 66. We stopped in Winslow the next morning to pick up a few groceries, grab an early lunch and check out the “Standin’ on a corner” monument.
After we finished there we continued east to Petrified Forest National Park. We were really impressed by this park and surprised we had missed it on our previous trips to Arizona but it wasn’t really on our route before now. We spent several hours checking out the various stops and viewpoints.
Unfortunately the time we spent at Petrified Forest made our next goal of finding a campsite at the first-come-first-served El Morro National Monument campground trickier. We got there around 6pm and found all of the sites already taken. We had no choice but to continue driving to the next town, another 45 minutes down the road. Faced with a few choices of expensive RV parks we opted to spend the night in the Walmart parking lot. The good news was it put us closer to Albuquerque where we had booked a service appointment for the RV the following day.
