Rex and Nancy's Travels - "ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST" - JRR Tolkein

Many more residents arrived and more activities have started in the park this month. We hike with 2 hiking groups each week. On Tuesdays we go with the “Stop and Smell the Roses” group which takes easier hikes with plenty of time to look at the surrounding area. On Friday’s we go with the “Friday Hike” group which does a little harder and longer hikes. Rex gets to go on some of the hikes depending on his work schedule. On days we are not hiking, Nancy does a floor exercise class at 8 am followed by a water aerobics class at 9 am. We are still taking Bailey with us on our daily walks with Camille and Cody. We also went on a 4-wheel drive trip with our Jeep group to Mt. Lemmon by Tucson. We drove up the back side of Mt. Lemmon and stopped at Summerhaven for a picnic lunch. Summerhaven is a small resort town by the ski area. We then took the highway back to Apache Junction. We keep forgetting to take our camera with us so we don’t have any hiking or 4-wheeling pictures yet. The park hos...

The first week we were in Arizona it was 104-107 F every day. We had a storm on Tuesday evening, the 5th, with high wind, heavy rain and some hail. We survived the storm OK but one RV here lost an awning and a few carports were damaged. One of our neighbors lost their Saguaro cactus. There was a lot of damage in the Mesa and Tempe area with power poles and trees lying on roofs. On Wednesday morning, there were 8 tornados around the Flagstaff area. One small town, Bellemont, lost 30 homes and a large number of RVs. The local news showed a picture of a Mobile Suites on its side. The door was against the ground so they had to rescue the couple through the back window. Was really sad to see a 5th wheel like ours destroyed. Luckily there was no one seriously injured in these storms. The storms brought some cooler weather and the forecast is for no more triple digit temperatures until next spring – Yeah! We bought a storage shed from another resident of the park. We were ...

We left Midland Monday morning and the truck is running great. We drove to El Paso and then up to Deming, NM where we spent the night at the Low-Hi RV Park. The park is nice and is the headquarters for Loners on Wheels, a singles camping organization. We were walking the dogs and got to view this spectacular New Mexico Sunset. Tuesday morning we had a good time watching this Roadrunner running around behind our 5 th wheel. We drove down I-10 to Lordsburg, NM and then headed North on Highway 70 through Globe and Superior, AZ. We arrived in Apache Junction early Tuesday afternoon and boy is it hot here - it was 104o F when we arrived. The forecast is for triple digits the rest of the week and then in the high 90’s next week. It is about 10o warmer here than normal. It seems like it has been 10o warmer than normal everywhere we have been this fall. We got settled into our site at Golden Sun RV Resort and are the only ones on our street. The park is really empty this time ...

Shortly after noon on Wednesday we noticed that the truck was losing power on the small hills of west Texas. It kept getting worse and black smoke starting coming out of the tailpipe. We stopped at a roadside picnic area about 30 miles east of Midland where the truck died and wouldn’t start again. Thank goodness for Good Sam Emergency Road Service! They found a towing company that had a truck big enough to tow the truck & 5th wheel.   They towed the truck & 5th wheel to the Ford dealership in Midland and we followed in the Jeep. We got there at 6 pm just as the dealership was closing. The tow truck driver parked the truck & 5th wheel on a side street beside the dealership and that’s where we spent the night. We couldn’t open the slide outs all the way so ate out at a great Mongolian grill with Jen, Rex’s daughter. After dinner we visited with Jen at her apartment until it was time to call it a night. Luckily the street the 5th wheel was parked on was a dead-end stre...

We took off Monday morning and didn’t even make it to the interstate before we had another blow out! We were able to pull into the driveway of the local Pepsi distributor where Rex took off the tire and went to the tire store where we bought the tire last week. They didn’t have one in stock and it would take a couple of days to get one. Rex came back to the 5th wheel and we were discussing that we really didn’t want to travel very far without a spare when a very nice man stopped and asked us if we needed help. He called a tire store close by and they had a tire. Instead of just giving Rex directions to the tire shop, he had Rex follow him in the Jeep to the store. Unfortunately we did not get his name but appreciated his help. With a 2nd new tire we were on our way. It was too hot to camp without electricity to run the air conditioner so we stopped at a very nice RV park in Hot Springs, AR called Cloud Nine RV Park. It was in a heavily wooded area and had a nice trail through the woo...

The brake caliper parts for the 5th wheel did not come in yesterday but are suppose to be in by noon today. Rex had called the company that manufactures the brakes and they told him how to bypass that wheel so that the rest of the brakes would work. After making that fix and bleeding the brakes we headed to Trailer World in Bowling Green and got there just before noon. Wouldn’t you know it, UPS was late today and we didn’t get the part until 2:00 pm. We then headed to Sikeston, MO where we arrived at Nancy’s brother’s house around 6:30 pm. Nancy’s nephew, Christopher, and his wife, Madison, have a house on 5 acres and we are parked on their property. We had a nice visit with Nancy’s brother, Bob, and his fiancée, Audrey.   We also enjoyed visiting with Christopher and Madison.   Bob’s two younger sons, Mike and Jason stopped by for a visit on Sunday.   Madison was babysitting her cousin’s little girl, Leyla and we got a cute picture of her riding Lilly, the Gre...

We drove to Georgetown, KY where we spent the night in the Wal-Mart parking lot. It was a busy area with lots of truck noise but we managed to get a good night’s sleep. Tuesday morning we headed towards mammoth Cave National Park. After about two hours we were on I-65 and a pickup pulled next to us, honked and motioned toward the rear of the 5th wheel. We pulled over and discovered that we had blown a tire. The tire was torn completely off the wheel and had wrapped around the axel and broke our brake line. The shoulder of the road was narrow and there was not a lot of room to change the tire. There were a lot of semi trucks going by and many of them couldn’t or wouldn’t change lanes. It took Rex a while to get the shredded tire unwrapped from the axel but after about an hour we were on our way again. We didn’t have brakes on the 5th wheel so we slowly drove the 30 miles to the campground. After getting set up in Diamond Caverns Resort & Golf Course, Rex went in search of parts to ...