Lets finish the details of the CA/AZ trip

Lets finish the details of the CA/AZ trip Saturday afternoon March 28, 2009 (ninth travelogue of this trip) Well, it seems a little strange to be finishing up this extended travelogue so belatedly. It further seems strange to be posting this information from Hawaii. That will be the subject of the next travelogue. Since we got home, I have been going at full speed on several projects. One was getting our taxes ready for our tax person. That takes a full 4 days of work to sort out all of the business records and expenses. You would think that I would use some sort of good business accounting system, but so far that has not happened. Given my tendency towards procrastination, I would probably not keep the records up to date anyway. Now to our trip home. After our wonderful, extended stay in Yuma, we headed home on March 2. The journey home was about 1200 miles, and we decided to break the trip down into smaller legs than we normally do. We have a goal to schedule shorter travel days, but somehow that does not always work out. Our first stop was the Cliff Castle Casino in Camp Verde, AZ (map). This is a casino between Phoenix and Flagstaff on I-17. We have stopped there before and Pat rates it as one of the better casinos. Our next stop was the Sky Casino (exit 102 on I 40 in NM) (map). We had not stopped there before. Again, Pat enjoyed the casino and came out ahead at these casinos. From there we made our traditional stop at the Wal Mart in Trinidad, CO (map). We tend to stop there, as it allows us to arrive home in the middle of the next day. We arrived home home March 5 about noon. On the last two legs of the trip we fought gusting cross winds most of the way. Some were very strong and at least one semi was blown over after we went through the area. Fortunately, the bus does pretty well when subjected to these terrible conditions, but it is still not a lot of fun. We did hit a good weather window for our trip home. A day or two after we got home we had a small snow storm. Given the road to our house, we would not want to be driving the bus in the snow. Periodically we update the statistics of our travels in the bus. We started our maiden voyage on March 6, 2006. In the three years since, we have spent 517 nights in the bus, and traveled over 50,000 miles. We have had almost no problems during that time – quite a feat give the age of the bus (over 24 years old) and the fact that it was modified/maintained by a crazy engineer {grin}. We feel very fortunate that we are able to travel in our very comfortable, fully equipped bus. I have attached a photo of the Shepherds and Hackenbruchs. That is all for this tripThe Shepherds and Hackenbruchs