The Road Goes On…

Today we recharged all our batteries – vacuum cleaner, cameras, toothbrush, shaver and our own batteries. The van did not move a single inch.

We walked down to the beach, saw a hare, talked to some super nice people, read, slept, learned about programming in Python, researched our route for the remaining two and half weeks and had a great pasta dinner on this rainy day.

It was a good thing we didn’t book the Antelope Canyon tour with all the rain. The forecast for tomorrow doesn’t look promising either.

We did catch up on our blog entries and posted five of them today (read them all!) despite the Internet being horribly slow here. The front desk told us the antenna had been hit by lightning the previous day, so perhaps they are still working on it.

No map today.

We decided to leave overrun Sedona and make it to Page, Arizona where the famous Antelope Canyon is located.

The drive took is through stunning scenery and we made several stops to do landscape photography and to look at some stands with Navajo pottery and jewelry.

We found outstanding pottery and woven rugs at the Cameron Gallery, but these pieces of art at several thousand dollars apiece, where definitely not impulse buys.

On our next stop we were fascinated by the red and grey mountains with spots of green vegetation.

The last stop before Page had us overlooking a tremendous plain with canyon and a mountain range in the background. The grey clouds made for dramatic scenery. Navajo jewelry stands are everywhere.

We tried to book a photography tour of Antelope canyon, but unfortunately they were all booked out. One tour company had space the following week and another told us we had to book 6 months to a year in advance.  We had an option to book an Antelope Canyon sightseeing tour at 5:30PM the next day, but weren’t sure about the weather forecast and decided against it.

The visitor centre was our next stop, but it had closed at 4:30PM so we opted for a stone baked pizza at a small Italian restaurant across the street.

Our next task was to find a site for the night and we found a great camping spot on Lake Powell. Lake Powell was formed in the 1960s when the Glen Canyon Dam was built.

Early in the morning we left our campsite and began our trek towards Jerome. Jerome was a copper mining town until 1953 when it became a ghost town. Hippies moved in and revitialized the town into an artist colony. The Jerome Historical Society began buying old properties and renovating them, giving visitors a feel for what the town had looked like in its heyday in the late 19th and beginning 20th century. The mine museum helped us get a deeper understanding of the history of the mining and day-to-day lives of its inhibitants, including the seedier parts.

We saw many nice shops and restaurants and had lunch at the Hilltop Deli where we sat on their dog friendly patio.

Our next stop was the Tuzigoot National Monument. This is the remains of a Sinagua village built on a hilltop. Villages such as this one were populated for hundreds of years and were abandoned in the late 1300s.

Sedona is a very busy and popular tourist destination, located in an absolutely stunning landscape. Our first stop was at a “visitor information center” where we were offered a $360 2-night RV camping and Jeep rental package for a mere $20. What was the catch you ask? This visitor information center was run by a timeshare company and wanted us to sit in on a 90 minute “no high pressure sales talk”. We politely declined, at which point the salesman’s demeanour changed dramatically, and slightly put off, visited an offical Arizona visitor center where we had the pleasure of getting a lot of information from a great agent.

Our next task was to find a home for the night and we found a great spot at the Cave Springs Campgound. Secure in the knowledge we had a place to stay, we drove back to Sedona to try and catch some sunset pictures. The clouds were not terribly cooperative. A bit disappointed we scouted out some potential locations for tomorrow morning but found many of them to be inaccessible with our van or overrun with people.

Tired and hungry we stopped for a BBQ dinner and then headed back to our campsite.

We woke up at 7AM to the sounds of our next door neighbour packing his things and leaving. Martin went to talk to the Park Ranger about the incident and the Ranger said that the site ticketing machine had no record of his 2PM booking and only confirmed ours.

It was a beautiful sunny day and we drove to the boat launch and unpacked our kayak to go for a paddle. What a fabulous way to begin the day – paddling on a lake surrounded by ganite boulders that looked almost like art.

In the afternoon we drove back to Prescott to enjoy the vibrant city and its colourful artist’s market in the park front of the court building. We saw lots of jewelery, photography, wood carvings, and, unfortunately, dogs which Pepsi needed to greet in her usual aggressive way. The business district of Prescott itself had lots of attractive stores, restaurants and saloons, reminding the tourists of Prescott’s mining past. We especially liked the Palace Restaurant and Saloon with its slogan “Pleasing Arizona’s toughest customers since 1877”.

In the evening we hiked back to the granite boulders for an sunset photoshoot.

The day started with a very early breakfast and then a trip to Freedom RV, a Roadtrek dealer in Arizona, to have the generator looked at again. We’d had some issues with it stalling and the air conditioner showing an E2 error code. They took a look at it and adjusted the governor on the generator and said it should be fine now.

We drove north on I-10 to Phoenix. The drive wasn’t all that exciting and it was VERY hot – 43C. We stopped at an Appleby restaurant that had free Wifi so that Martin could look after some business and we enjoyed a very nice hamburger.

We continued on Hwy-60 to Wickenburg, a town with a history of cowboys, miners looking for gold, and a railway. The town has statues of historical figures and their professions, along with a short audio segment describing their lives in Wickenburg. The town has a number of trades represented today – a hat maker and a saddle maker.

Wickenburg was also very hot and we were happy to head into the lush cool mountains for our next stop. It was a beautiful drive to Prescott. We drove through this very attractive city to a fabulous campground on Watson Lake just outside of town.

We tried to have an early night but were awakened by an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night. We saw a flashlight and looked out the window and there was an SUV parked right next to us on our site. When Martin asked whether everything was OK, the response was that he had booked our site at 2PM in the afternoon and was surprised to find the site occupied.