Wrapping it up in Yuma -- for this season . . . .

Well, its time to get things packed up and hit the road again.  We need to be in Des Moines by May 11 for our job, and we want to do some stops and riding along the way.

Our friends Larry and Jan are storing their 5th wheel in our storage unit in Yuma for the summer rather than take it up north and then just bring it back down in the fall.  We've got the back end and one side of our 50 X 14 storage "garage" loaded up with our stuff, but we managed to arrange it so their 39 foot fifth wheel just fit.  Mike took over the final stages of the maneuvering to get the rig in -- but all worked out as planned.


We wanted to bring all five of our bikes with us for the summer, so we spent some time figuring out how to engineer all of them in the back of the Odyssey.  The tandem and the two mountain bikes are pretty inaccessible for riding until we get to Iowa, but we arranged things so that the road bikes are pretty easy to get out -- we plan on riding in Santa Fe and during our week in Denver.  We hope to do some rides with our cycling friends, Mark and Sandy and will meet up with them when we get there.






We left Yuma on Monday morning the 21st, heading north to Kingman, Arizona,  before going east on I-40 to Flagstaff for Mandy's doctor visit.  This route is only 40 miles further than going through the Phoenix area, and up I-17, and it misses all the metro area traffic, as well as the climb in and out of the Verde Valley / Cottonwood area north of Phoenix.  We stopped for lunch just north of Quartzsite, at the location where we've boondocked several times during the Quartzsite RV show -- no one was there (surprise!) and we were able to get a couple of good pictures of the rig.


We're currently at Meteor Crater, just east of Flagstaff, where we worked last summer -- and where the wind is blowing as usual -- 20-25 sustained, with 40 mpg gusts.  The slide topper awnings on the motorhome are getting a real workout!  The wind should die down some by mid-day tomorrow, but we're glad that we're not on the road today -- even though its a quartering wind, it was blowing us around a bit on the short trip here from Flagstaff.  We'll visit with our friends here for a day or two and then head for Santa Fe to see my brother and get a bit of biking in, the altitude there should be challenging.