“Ketchup” Post #1 6/29/23

WOW! It’s been over two months since our last post!! So sorry to keep you waiting!

So much has happened, so lets just jump in with a bunch of photos to bring you back up to speed with all that’s been going on…!

At the end of April, we left Cottonwood and headed back down to Phoenix for 36 hours to run some errands for our friend, Mike; check in with our other friend, Mike; and buy lots of groceries. The trip down I-17 is always a fast one as the interstate drops from 4,000 feet in elevation to just over a thousand in about an hour. After stocking up on the things that are hard to find in Small Town USA, we jumped on the road and set our GPS toward Dolan Springs to visit our property.

Our acre isn’t much more than a piece of the Mohave Desert, but we love it and are so excited to call it ours!

After a lot of digging and a lot of ice water (it was pretty hot that day even though it was only the end of April) we finally had a spot level enough and long enough to pull the bus, the Jeep, and the trailer onto our little piece of heaven. It took several attempts as we grossly underestimated the angle at which the bus’ tires would hit the ‘driveway’. Once we tried to just gun it up over that bit of an incline you can see in the photo below that is the barrier between the road and our property. That didn’t go so well as I was literally pushing the accelerator all the way down and we weren’t even moving an inch. It wasn’t that we didn’t have traction – the wheels weren’t even spinning at all even though I was giving it all she had! But – we finally made it up onto the property and made some tuna sandwiches for dinner. The cats got a chance to go out and explore and it was nice to finally let them out on land that is ours!

The next morning, we backed out (we didn’t have the daylight or the energy to make the driveway a semicircle) and headed on our way. Next stop: the Walmart Supercenter in Payson, Utah. Unless you want to over-night in Vegas an hour and some change from our property, there is literally nothing else to stop at before Payson. This was by far our longest travel day on the itinerary and we wanted to start it early.

We made it across the Hoover Dam, and sometime after this (it all became a blur) we lost our radiator fan. As you might remember, back in Phoenix we had Tony, our trusty bus mechanic, install an override switch because our fan wasn’t kicking on reliably. This switch had been working GREAT and we weren’t overheating AT ALL! But the motor must have been on the fritz and with all the extra running it was doing, eventually just gave up the ghost. We weren’t able to get more than a mile or so down the road without overheating and with mountain after mountain to climb just ahead of us, we decided to call it quits for the afternoon and catch a few hours of sleep on some BLM Land right off the highway. We woke up around 4 am and headed back out knowing the only way to make it through the next day and a half would be to travel in the cold of the night so the engine could have 40 degree air rushing over it. We made it to the next town just before daybreak and stopped to reevaluate our directions. We opted for a slightly less mountainous, but longer route and tried to make it closer to Rocky Ridge Outpost. We quickly realized that we could not drive after 7 am because the sun was just too warm, so we cozied up for a bit of a nap before getting ready for an all-nighter.

It was hard to see the gorgeous scenery of this Scenic Highway in the dead of night, but just as the sun was rising we were passing by this lake at the foot of the snow-capped mountains! With only about an hour of drivable temperatures left, we didn’t stop, but took this photo on the move to get as far as we possibly could!

I think we stopped to sleep again during that day, but I can’t quite remember where. All I know is the next picture in the phone is of daybreak the next morning!

Above is the bus flying down the hill at 70 MPH attempting to get enough cold air over the engine and picking up enough speed to make it up the portion of road ahead of us called “Highway to Heaven”. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but if you look at the way the headlights of the oncoming traffic are seemingly coming straight down from the sky you will understand the moniker. The horizon to the right of the highway is littered with wind turbines as there is a constant wind all the way up there.

By 7AM we were crossing back into Utah and had gained enough elevation that we could push though the final couple of hours in the daylight. We stopped just briefly enough to wash all the bugs off the windshield (the bus has new windshield wipers to be safe in the rain, but we haven’t figured out the washer fluid yet) and get this Daggett County, Utah photo only 20 minutes from Rocky Ridge!!

The next thing we knew, we were pulling into our old “home” spot and falling asleep again while we waited for the other couple to arrive and stagger our parking spots so we could overlook the property as much as possible.

This is South Valley Road – a mile and a half down it is where you find our bus. It’s beautiful here and we are so thankful to live here!!

‘Ketchup’ Post #2 coming soon…!