Mesa, AZ

Mesa, AZ - June 20 - 23

We arrived early in the morning in Mesa at the Usery Mountain Recreational Area (it's called something along those lines, we just call Usery) after pulling out of Lazy Days at 6:30 AM. Yes, that early. Dad wakes up every morning at 5:00 AM. I've been sleeping to about 6:45--7:00 AM  only because it is so bright in the morning that it's hard for me to stay asleep. The GPS gets us right here (she has been behaving much better since the beginning of this trip).    We pull into the campground and climb out to chat with the guys in their booth.  We tell them we're here to camp (by the way, there is not a motorhome/trailer/anything on any site...at all)  He goes "OK, well do you have a reservation?" Dad replies with, "No," and the guy looks at his computer, clicks around and goes, "Well, we do have vacancies." We have noticed....no kidding! There is no one here. It's 110 degrees. Only the crazies come out here. There are four sites that have extra large car ports for shade and those are for the campground hosts (the extra crazies) that are responsible for the cleanliness of the park, etc.

 We manage to find a spot we are satisfied with that qualifies as a "pull-through" but we really just pulled off the side of the campground straight onto the gravel. There is a picnic area with a sturdy picnic table.  We are facing north so that when the sun sets, our patio will be shaded in the evening...even though it's still so HOT!

Same outfit as dinner the night before, oh well. Here I am on the patio side of the Newell where we will have shade in the evenings. I bet those chairs would burn my butt if I sat in them in the middle of the day!

Don't touch. This is the landscape of the entire campground.

Dad actually bought the Newell in Mesa, AZ in February 2010 and picked it up in Mesa in June 2010, and almost to the day, two years later, we are back again to visit. Another Newell friend - Tom McCloud lives in Mesa and I met him when we came to Mesa to pick up the Newell. Right now, Tom is basically totally re-doing a 2002 Newell in his driveway and Dad has been summoned to work on the air conditioner. The first night we were here, we went over to Tom's to see the Newell and his work.   An amazing amount of time and effort  has gone into his Newell. Tom bought the Newell from Honda Racing and it was basically a party bus for the races on the weekends. There were plenty of clues of prior parties!  Dad and I are both really impressed with the handy work of Tom and his wife Darlene.    They have a daughter, Heather, who is my age.   It's great to visit with her and become better friends as our Dads work away at their project.

On Thursday morning, I headed up to the Nature Center for Yoga. When I was in the Keys this past spring, I spent a lot of time doing Yoga because it was time for me to do something for myself, and give Dad a break from me as well!! I thought I might be the only person taking it, especially because it was a week day.  It was such a terrific class!  Misty practiced right next to me and she saw that I had the ability to go through a pretty tough class (Thanks, Catherine!!!!).   We had a great time. Although we were inside, we looked out  huge glass windows to the desert too see the little critters running around. Great start to my day, and I definitely appreciated her teaching skills. Dad spent the rest of the day working on my computer as it seems the hard drive might be crashing soon. Luckily for me, he knows how to take precautions and work on backing up all of my things to a separate hard drive....on and on....I'm so lucky he can take care of that for me!!

At Usery, there are great hiking trails all over the area, and Dad choose one called Wind Cave which we planned to hike on Friday morning. I mean, like get up at 4:45 and start hiking by 5:15 in the morning. This was in order to avoid as much sun as possible and have the hopes of being outside when it was a tad cooler than the 111 degrees in the middle of the day. Well, we thought we were the early birds, but turns out other people were already on the trail by the time we started. The trail was a total of 3 miles and was pretty steep at the end. It was very different than hiking in the Smoky Mountains because you could see everything as the landscape is so different. We could even see people way up ahead of us on the trail. We also saw people turn around at the trail head and do the hike again. Good for them, but I went back to bed for 3 more hours!!!

Personally, I was thrilled to get up at 4:45 and hike...when it was already light outside.

This is the terrain of the trail...it looks flat, but I promise it had a steady incline.
Then really went up nearing the end of the hike. This is about 5:30 am.

View from the top...with binoculars, we could clearly see the side of the Newell. It's a little difficult to see the terrain because of the way the sun was rising, but we managed to avoid it until the last 15 minutes of the hike...which was about 6:45 AM. It gets so BRIGHT so EARLY here.

Here I am at the Wind Cave. Probably eating food and wishing I was still in bed, althoug it was a really great hike and was some good exercise for both of us

At the end of our hike. Happy to be done!

Always in fishing gear.

Just in case you got lost and needed to know which way to Phoenix.

We spent both Saturday and Sunday at Tom's so he and Dad could work on Tom's Newell. I was very useful by staying out of the way and reading and tinkering around, sitting by the pool, and helping with the special sheets for the Newell bed with its rounded corners.  We had dinner at the McCloud's almost every night that we were there and truly enjoyed their company. This week they are heading east and will actually visit the Bare Farm (in the Ozarks, which we visited at the beginning of this adventure). We really enjoy the cities out here in the west. Everything is  organized and new.  The city has this feeling that it was well designed for its future growth. On the interstates, in preparation for expansion, there were even exits that had already been built, but with no roads. Very cool to see! So far we are loving it especially as time passes and we get more into the swing of things. So overall, Mesa gets an A+ from us!

A to Z....Arizona!