Our Time in Cottonwood Brief, but Busy!

Cottonwood, AZ.  Highs: high 50's to low 60's   Lows: high 20's to low 30's.  Site: M-16. AT&T connectivity very good with hot spots and T-Mobile Mifi

We are only in Cottonwood for two weeks this visit, but we've managed to keep quite busy. We are still waiting for our jacks to come in and be replaced. Sparky, despite getting a new crown in record time, is still having aching somewhere in the general vicinity of the crown--uh-oh! That could be just the tooth still adjusting or another one squawking, who knows. By the way, if you need any dental care in the area, Sparky recommends Peak Family Dental Care in Cottonwood. There are three locations for this dentistry practice. Although the office was super small and parking was at a premium, Sparky received EXCELLENT care for her broken tooth. And if she should have go back to see what else is going on with her teeth, she will definitely head back there.

porcelain cube ready to be cut

After carving

After being filed down, it was replaced with a porcelain crown, made with the latest CAD imagery and machinery, carved from a porcelain cube while she waited. The machine was like a dual Dremel tool, carving and spinning and spraying the cube while it was being carved. Then the little purple tooth capsule was popped into a kiln and baked for about 15 minutes at about 2800 degrees and turned into the tooth enamel color. It was fascinating to watch! Dr. Shanahan was one of the first several hundred in the nation to get the "carving" machine and has been doing crowns this way for many years.

She was in and out in less than 4 hours, completely done.

So, above and beyond dental and jacks, there are a TON of things to do here in the area and we have done some. We are saving Sedona activities and hiking for our next three week stay, our last, coming up after a week in Yuma. Here is just a sample of things to do while staying at Thousand Trails Verde Valley:

Visit the Alcantara Winery just around the corner from the RV park. It's part of the Verde Valley Wine Trail.  Visit Red Rock State Park, Slide Rock State Park (in Sedona) and Dead Horse Ranch State Park, Sparky's favorite. Near Dead Horse Ranch is Blazin' M Ranch known for their chuckwagon dinners and Wild West shows. They are also adding Conestoga wagon units for "glamping". Check out Sedona Wetlands, about a mile outside of Sedona. Visit Jerome, an old mining town with supposedly lots of haunted places. Drive the scenic route over Mingus Mountain from Jerome to Prescott. It's a little scary two lane highway 89A snaking through mountain canyons and having steep drop-offs.  You DON'T want to take an RV of any length on this drive! You will attain an elevation of over 6,00 feet before winding back down. While at more calming lower elevations, visit Tuzigoot National Monument (use your senior pass) and Montezuma's Castle. Visit the Arizona Copper Museum in Clarkdale, nearby. Be sure to read Sparky's two posts about the copper museum, it was that great!

Hotel Connor 1898

One day this week, we headed to the Haunted Hamburger joint up in Jerome. Jerome became a deserted ghost town in 1953 after gold and copper dwindled in the mountains. People rallied to save Jerome, preserved and restored it and billed it as the largest ghost city in America. Many of the original buildings line the streets. There is Jerome State Park nearby too, if you should choose to visit, with a mining museum in the historic Douglas Mansion, and the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town situated nearby as you come out of Jerome and head back to Cottonwood.

Jerome is a town nestled into the side of a mountain. It's steep and windy to get up there. Parking is at a premium on twisted narrow streets in Jerome if you have a big truck like ours. We found a big parking lot up on a hill behind the fire station. It even has spots for RVs, but we don't recommend driving anything bigger than a small travel trailer up to Jerome. There are extremely tight turns around town and the roads are super steep. There are cute shops there but we couldn't explore the town because of limited parking. It's very touristy, of course. The Haunted Hamburger is part of the Haunted Group, and ghost tours are big in this town. Hard to tell whether there really have been any hauntings or ghostly apparitions seen, but you just have to go and experience things for yourself if you believe in that sort of stuff. There are photos all over the walls that show weird shadowy images, some photographed from previous owners and supposedly, things have flown off shelves before. During renovations, doors opened and shut on their own, and other weird things happened. Locals provided even more ghostly lore and the restaurant became a "thing"!

We had good burgers and outstanding onion rings at the Haunted Hamburger, which sits on a cliffside overlooking the Verde Valley and the San Francisco Peaks for fantastic views. They had cool tee shirts for sale. 

Eldy tried to pull a fast one on Sparky. "Did you feel that guy just brush across your shoulder? " Wha-a-a-a-t???" "Yeah, a guy just went by you, and touched your shoulder as he passed."  "What guy? There isn't any guy nearby!" Sparky whipped around, there was no one. Haha, very funny, Eldo.

The scenic drive from Jerome across Mingus Mountain was outstanding and just a tad bit scary in a big dually truck. It is also called the Mingus Mountain Scenic Road. Steep drop offs and winding sharp curves with some 11% maximum grade points make the 19 mile drive thrilling! We loved the drive the day we took it.

We are seeing some birds in the RV park--mountain bluebirds and hummers. The bluebirds seem to hang out more in the RC track, back trails and bush area than elsewhere in the park.

Outside the park, over at Dead Horse Ranch State Park, some more house finches, an evening grosbeak, a Cassin's finch, goldfinches and a bridled titmouse. Is the plural titmice? Sparky sees several of them every time. it's wonderful that the Audubon Society has feeder stations at this state park and supplies them constantly so we can enjoy the beauty of the many different birds that come to feed.

Cassin's finch and lesser goldfinch

bridled titmouse

Sparky visited the Copper Museum in Clarkdale...that was so amazing it's a complete separate, two part blog and you can read about it if you missed it. https://whereseldo.blogspot.com/2023/02/copper-is-king-in-arizona-part-i.html

With one day left, Sparky got in a short hike along the Jail Trail in Cottonwood. It's a short loop trail, about 1.6 miles and is rocky and uneven in spots, but pretty level, making it an easy trail to walk. It is NOT wheelchair accessible and veers off in different directions if you are not watching the signs. Parts of it are through a LOT of dead, fallen big cottonwood trees and tree debris, parts of it are along the beautiful Verde River. Huge white barked, dormant Fremont cottonwood trees back up against the sky along the river....It's not a very scenic hike at all, you could probably find better ones for sure, especially over at Dead Horse Ranch State Park, but the weather was just perfect for hiking, so it was still enjoyable. Now if Sparky could just get her sciatica under control, it would be a LOT more enjoyable.

We are preparing to head to Yuma. Today is pack up, stow all loose, flying around stuff, secure the items in the fridge, etc. (The last time we drove over very bad roads, Sparky forgot to stow the egg carton securely--in a refrigerator bin) and we had unintentional scrambled eggs all over the kitchen slide floor. Yuck!) The jacks are supposed to be repaired the day we have to leave. We will pull our slides in, hitch up the truck and Currier Masters RV Repair is coming out to replace both front landing jacks at 8:00 sharp. Fingers crossed that this will take care of the automated leveling system which has not worked in quite awhile....

See you in Yuma, Arizona!

Settled in Sedona

Cottonwood, AZ   Thousand Trails Verde Valley    Site: J-6

Weather this week: Highs: high 50's to low 60's, Lows: high 30's

AT&T hotspots very good, T-Mobile mifi very slow.

Technically, we are in Cottonwood, AZ, which is 24.7 miles from Sedona but Sparky liked the title of "Settled in Sedona", haha. Because it's pretty chilly and we are only here for one week, we are going to do maintenance chores on our RV (cleaning jacks, trying to fix the bad jack, spot cleaning the outside) and cleaning the refrigerator vents. Sparky happened to think about how so easily dusty the whole RV gets, so she thought she better check underneath the fridge. Can't check behind the RV fridge, it's really in a tight space, so she looked down under the fridge, and OMG. It was crudded up (is that a real word? wonders Eldo) really badly with dust. How often does a 72 year old get down on her hands and knees with a flashlight to see how dirty and dusty things REALLY are??? We only see the dust flying around when the sun shines directly through the entire coach. So, not that often. There are some good things about getting older and having aging eyes. Harder to see those dust bunnies, dontcha know!

The vacuum attachments were not able to reach the deep vents, so Eldo found a hack on cleaning them while researching how to find and clean RV fridge vents-- USE A STRAW taped to the crevice tool! Brilliant! Problem solved for the time being, except it was a wimpy straw and kept bending in the middle.

We are going to try to get another mobile tech to come out and look at our bad front left jack, which is still not functioning properly despite brand new RV batteries. We are fairly certain at this time, that the jack has gone bad. It doesn't respond to the automatic leveling commands and continuously gives a fault error.  It feels like we are cockeyed and the coach isn't as level inside as we would like it. The front jacks are the key to the whole rest of the leveling system getting the RV level front to back and side to side. If the front ones aren't performing together correctly, then we can't use the automatic leveling system--which is a really neat feature. When it works, we push a button outside in one of the bays, and the whole coach levels itself from front to back and side to side with sometimes miniscule movements. It's neat to watch, except when it's raining. So far we've been told by three different techs including Lippert that it could be 1. the batteries, 2. a bad jack, 3. the motor, or 4. the motherboard (the panel that operates the whole leveling system). We replaced the batteries and knocked out solution #1. Eldy has gotten pretty good at leveling the rig manually, which is no small feat, as the control panel is a little complicated, and it's easy to hit the wrong set of panel buttons and forget to press enter in between commands on the panel, which is confusing to look at in the first place. A new jack costs around 400-800 dollars, so we're not too thrilled at having to get a new one. Maybe we will have to order one and then try and find someone to replace it for us. Cottonwood is not a major metropolis like Tucson, so it might be a little more of a challenge to get it replaced in a timely manner. In the meantime, we can live with manual leveling.

Well, we finally got to the bottom of this jack problem and it took a very capable and knowledgable tech to come out and DIAGNOSE for FREE the actual problem. We went to the park gate office and they gave us a reference of guy that came very highly recommended. We called him and he came right out to our site today. He is not going to charge us until he gets the part and installs it. We don't have a bad motor, we have a bad part within the motor, and in order to fix it, you can't just buy the little part, you have to buy a new motor. Well, naturally. Kudos to Jon Currier, of Currier Master Mobile Service, a fantastic mobile repair guy, trained and certified with MANY years of experience, who tested out several different parts of the system, who finally had a definitive answer by ruling out different scenarios instead of just semi guessing and saying we needed a new jack. AND--he also spotted some black soot on the outside of our water heater, checked the air flow tube, and it was too narrow, not allowing enough air to enter so the heater was burning hotter than it needed to be on gas, and spitting out soot above the panel. He adjusted it, and gave us a little lesson on how it should operate, again, at no charge. He said he was in this business to teach and provide mobile service at the most reasonable cost and wasn't in it to make a lot of money! What a nice man! We greatly appreciated his observance of our water heater and we learned something new about operating it. We always worry about so many things we DON'T know about and don't know how to fix, but we have been super lucky in finding great techs to come out and help us learn, even if they aren't always totally correct. Kind of like going to the doctor..."Well, I think it may be this, so let's try that...." This guy really knows his field. Eldo was impressed with everything he had on his truck! This was one of several he has, and it's a smaller one.

So now, we wait to hear the cost which shouldn't be outrageous because he is a Lippert dealer and has several suppliers he can work with to shop around to get us a decent price. Then he will come out and finish the job. Although we are only here a week this time, we will be back in two weeks for a three week stay so hopefully he can do it then.

View from the top of the park in "M" section

Thousand Trails Verde Valley is at an elevation of 3340 feet and is a big park, 300 acres, in the high desert spread out over rolling hills and land tiers. There are 371 sites. It is surrounded by the Mingus Mountains and Red Rocks. Sparky tried riding her bike a little the first couple of days we were here. Forget THAT! There is a BIG change in elevation from the most expensive sites with the best views of Sedona and the mountains at the top of the park, to down to the bottom where the cheapest 30 amp sites are crowded, tight, and there are no views. M section is the elite top view with the best 360 degree view of the mountains all around.

Another view in a different part of "M" section

It's almost impossible to ride up and down the park roads and NOBODY rides a bike in this park so that was all Sparky needed to wait for better days to ride. There are nice little narrow walking trails around the hills between the tiered sites and since we are at 3350 feet, it will be good exercise. And hey, the views.....wonderful! Sparky recommends a hiking pole--trails are narrow and very pebbly and rocky, you know, the slippery, sliding kind of rocks. You can easily get a couple of miles or more in for a hiking/walk by traipsing around the hills in the park and with significant elevation changes, it's great cardio.

The views where we are in the "J"- 50 amp section are not too shabby, either! This is the view out in front of our rig right out our "front yard".

The pool is shut down indefinitely for repairs. But who cares? It's really chilly during the day! This park even has a remote control raceway for the RC hobbyist. You don't see that very often at all. by the way, there are NO laundry facilities in TT Verde Valley. You have to go into town to do your laundry if you don't have units in your rig. We don't. Sparky has a craft closet instead, haha.

There are three major grocery stores in Cottonwood--a Fry's, a Safeway, and a Walmart. There are fast food chains to pick from, some decent restaurants and a vineyard nearby the RV park, the Alcantara Vineyards. There are several tasting rooms and wine bars in Old Cottonwood, a neat little portion of the city of Cottonwood, with cool shops and great little eateries. We ate at the Tavern Grille, a repeat from last year, which is a great restaurant with a great industrial vibe inside and great food. Highly recommend it.

We also recommend Bocce Pizzeria, a great Italian restaurant that makes all their breads and pizza crusts homemade with a cool indoor outdoor open air bar seating. A house salad was quite expensive, (11.00) but it was the most beautifully presented salad Sparky has ever seen! Everything coming out of the kitchen was beautiful. The pizza was thinner crust and not enough cheese for Sparky, but it was delicious as well.

We really do love this park because it's fairly close to Sedona, without all the tourist crowds, but has its own vibe seeming to be in the mountains and Verde Valley at the same time. Beautiful sunrises and sunsets seem to be the norm in Arizona, we've been seeing them almost every day unless it's cloudy. It's wonderful, too, to be seeing the red rocks in the distance, which are calling Sparky's name.

Sparky visited Dead Horse Ranch State Park. (Great name, eh?) For seven dollars daily use fee, you can walk trails there, bird watch and get some nice exercise. The Audubon Society fills bird feeders in a small area off Owl Creek Road. Sparky saw lots of finches, juncos and wrens the day she went.

Love the purple finches, or house finches, whatever they are! 

It's a beautiful park in January.....You can camp in an RV there, but no full hookups, just water and electric, unless you are the "lagoon host", a work camping job. The host's site is situated right in the center of the lagoon area under shady trees and has full hookups-- water, electric, and sewer. Nice! But it would be a super hot location in the summer. There are three lagoons where lots of locals come to fish. Usually there are lots of water fowl, but today Sparky only saw a lone pie billed grebe and a mallard pair.

In the park is a wonderful walk to Tavasci Marsh, a little over a mile, round trip. On the way you can see Tuzigoot National Monument off to your left of the trail. This view of the. monument, straight on, is from far away, there are closer views when you first start out on the trail.

This is a cool monument to visit if you are interested. It's a hilltop pueblo that grew into one of the largest villages in the area one thousand years ago by the Sinagua people. It's a great glimpse into prehistoric life of Arizona people. Here is a closer view from the trail.

Tavasci Marsh is just a marsh with LOTS of tall grasses and at the very end, a small body of water for the ducks and a viewing platform for you, but it was a beautiful walk back to it. Sparky likes looking up the names of local plants wherever she hikes, using the app, Seek. This is a barberry, like a form of holly.

Today there was a pair of ring necked ducks swimming around but too far away to capture it.

The trail markers on the way are a marvel to read. They have LOTS of information on them for whatever mode of transportation you are using on the trails whether a bike, a horse (!) or your feet. It tells you what the grade of the trail is, the cross slope--(the side to side elevation), the tread width, and what the trail is made of! Guess a lot of that might be helpful to a mountain biker, of which Sparky saw several heading out in other directions and other trails. They even give you a math example (Sparky needs that, haha) of what they mean, like if the typical grade is 2.6% and 5% of the trail is 10-22%, then 225 feet of the trail is 10-22%. That reference to slope vaguely reminded Sparky of a "rise over run" formula, a long distant math topic on which she probably failed and doesn't care to revisit. Oh, and by the way....8% is a standard ramp. HUNH? A mountain biker will understand. Sparky stood there for quite a few moments trying to digest all this, before heading on her way, because she was walking after all. Update: additional trail recommended at Dead Horse Ranch State Park is the Lime Kiln Trail. You can pick it up right behind the middle lagoon. It's a beautiful trail, with a little bit of elevation climb and gorgeous views of the valley. It is a shared mountain bike trail so keep your eyes peeled for bikers coming down or up. Sparky hiked it without poles the first time, but if a little bit of climbing up bothers you, then one pole is great for balance. Sparky used a single one the second time and liked it much better.

(Sparky will be visiting the trails in Sedona on our next visit to Cottonwood) and unfortunately, also a dentist, because a major portion of a tooth broke off the week we were here. Ugh.....

So we will see you down the road next in Mesa, AZ in our next blog. Until next time......Sparky and Eldo

And Everything Comes to a Halt for the Moment

Back in late summer of last year, we had a suspension bracket break behind our wheels of our fifth wheel. It could have been disastrous, but we were lucky. We were able to get it repaired, before the tires had gotten too close to each other, possibly rubbing enough friction to start a fire or explode a tire. We found an excellent body shop guy in Ashtabula, OH, who welded and repaired the broken bracket with a new plate. We had been watching the other side for a possible problem and here it comes. This was the crack (photo on the left) when we got the tires off and replaced in Tucson. We were ready to leave the next day so thought we could make it ok to Cottonwood. We did. BUT--this is the crack as we arrived in Cottonwood. We had some bad sections of I-10 but not sure if that made the existing crack much worse. Much worse than we thought.

We are NOT going to drive the rig in this condition. We could limp to an auto body shop like we did before if we can find one in town. But, as we are here for 11 days, we are going to try and find a mobile tech who can come and make the repair on site. After calling around, we found one! We HIGHLY recommend Verde Valley Auto Electric, and specifically, Jack Crow. He moved his schedule around, so he could get to us before we were scheduled to leave Jan. 31st. He was professional, kind, and knowledgable about all things RV. The only things he said he doesn't work on, are black tank issues. Can't blame him there. The price of the repair was very reasonable and he did some major welding and reinforcing so the bracket should hold for a long time to come. The one thing we learned and didn't realize that those suspension brackets don't always break because of driving on bad roads (as Lippert, the manufacturer tried to tell us) but that if you make severe cornering turns while maneuvering your RV into tight places and difficult sites, you are stressing the suspension bracket to the max. He said that you can tell that's happening when the tires appear to flex abnormally so like when the fifth wheel is at a right angle to the truck. Sparky had noticed this a time or two, but didn't realize it was not a good thing. Sometimes you are forced into backing into very tight spaces with very little room to maneuver, like no room in front of you to pull forward and back.

In the meantime, as it is the weekend, we are exploring the area. We took a drive into Sedona, just to see how much it's changed in the 10 years since we've been there. It's gotten more developed, as expected, the crowds seem bigger despite Covid, but the scenery remains as spectacular as ever.  We are about 25 miles from Sedona from our RV park. 

We attempted to visit the Chapel of the Holy 

Cross, built into the side of the mountain in Sedona, but the parking areas are very restrictive and tiny-- it was impossible to get in on an early afternoon the day we tried. It's a must see, if you can time it right.

Sparky has visited Dead Horse Ranch State Park three times. It's 7.00 each time to get in, or you can buy an annual pass for 75.00 plus a 7.00  handling fee. We just couldn't decide when to buy it and when we would be back to AZ to use it to pay the yearly amount so for now, we will see how much more we want to visit the state parks. Dead Horse Ranch State Park is beautiful and big, 423 acres. There are 10 miles of hiking trails, 150 campground sites, some big rig friendly, and beautiful changes of habitat as you make your way through the park.

There are three lagoons that you can get an easy hike in of about 2 miles or more by going all the way around them twice. There are ring neck ducks in the pond, and the scenery is beautiful. That's one thing we have noticed about this area. Cloudless skies are common and the day time temps, although cool in the fifties, are very warm in the sun.

There is a birding area at Dead Horse Ranch. They put out some feeders and thistle seed socks. That usually attracts a lot of birds! The first time Sparky went, there were birds galore....house finches, goldfinches and more. How about a bridled titmouse? Sparky loves learning more bird species and plant species in Arizona.

Bridled Titmouse

The other two times, there were no birds. Phooey! Must have been the time of day, which was midday the second and third visit. Best to go early morning or late afternoon. Nice walking trails in the park, no elevation or climbing....You are traveling through very old cottonwood and aspen forests in the birding section area which is off Owl Road. 

There are other trails available that connect to other parts of Cottonwood, such as the 15 mile old wagon road Lime Kiln Trail, which connects Dead Horse Ranch to Red Rock State Park, and is a shared use trail, but Sparky wants to do more serious hiking and climbing in Sedona after doing a terrific hike recently. (See last blog post, about Devil's Bridge.) It's going to be hard to top that one! 

Sparky also visited the Tuzigoot National Monument nearby in Cottonwood. Don't you just LOVE that name? It's Apache for "crooked water". Sparky went to visit it just because of the name. It's a national park service site, so be smart and have your senior pass with you so you don't have to pay 10.00 to visit. (I'm always telling her TAKE YOUR PARK PASS WITH YOU! says an exasperated Eldo.) This monument is dedicated to preserving the history of the Southern Sinagua, who lived in Verde Valley thousands of years ago and flourished. 

Bird's eye view of the remains

The Sinagua lived by farming, hunting, and gathering. When they lived in the area, water was plentiful and the land was fertile. Their pueblo dwellings were huge and made from cobblestones. The original village was two stories high, and had 87 ground floor rooms! There were few exterior doors, they used ladders through roof openings. It's hard to imagine the original structures from cobblestone ruins, but the park service does a great job with signage and information about these Arizona peoples. Both this site and Montezuma's castle (which your entry fee ALSO covers) are worth visiting to learn more about the Sinagua. Montezuma's Castle is 33 miles from Tuzigoot Monument. It is also a Sinagua dwelling, in a cliff recess 100 feet above the valley. Both sites have a nice, short hard surface walking trails with signage to learn more about the area and the people who originated here.

We are headed out in a couple of days for Mesa, Arizona. We will be there a short while, and then back we come to Verde Valley. There is so much more to see and do here!  We hope you are enjoying and learning along with us, we so appreciate those who stop to read and see what we are up to!  See you later down the road.....