Where Should We Go?

After our visit with family and friends, we start our drive south.  We are always flexible at this stage of the game because we aren’t quite sure how long it will take to get over the Siskiyous at the beginning of January.  Over the years we have had all kinds of weather for the drive and we know that we may need to stop and wait for a storm to pass.  There is a great RV park called 7 Feathers just North of the mountains where we could wait if we needed to.  We haven’t needed to yet, but we know it’s there.  I will review this park later.   We usually stay there on our way home and it is one of the best parks we’ve found in our travels.  

This year’s road travels are a good example of how we plan our trip to the sun.  When we left Portland at about 10:30 AM we planned to stop in 7 Feathers for the night because the weather forecast was for high winds and rain in the Siskiyous.  As we got closer to our destination, we decided that the wind wasn’t that bad and we’d soldier on.  We cleared the mountains at about 5:00 PM and entered California.  We decided to just keep driving and stay in a rest stop when we were tired of driving.  At about 8PM we pulled into a rest stop, had some dinner and went to bed.  

The next day, we planned to drive to the Orange Grove Campground in Bakersfield and spend a couple of days.  When we were about a mile from the off ramp to Bakersfield I suggested we just keep driving and stay in another rest stop and head to Arizona the following day.  So on we went into the night.  We stopped at a rest stop to cook a meal around 7PM and decided to drive to the next rest stop to sleep.  The next rest stop was filled to the brim with trailer trucks parked nose to nose on the off and on ramps and in all of the parking slots.  We drove on to a large parking lot in Videl Junction and pulled in at about 11PM.  There were a few trucks and trailers parked in the lot. so lots of room for us.

We have a reservation at the Cave Creek Campground just northeast of Phoenix on January 15th so we needed a place to stay until then.  On the second driving day, I perused our Allstays App and found a few campgrounds in the Phoenix area. The first one didn’t have availability and the second one did.  The Cotton Lane Campground, located in Goodyear, just west of Phoenix became our destination. We pulled in at about 3PM on our third day of driving.  Overall, we drove for 30 hours and spent a couple of nights on the road.  

We love the flexibility of traveling with our home attached.  We can go where the mood and weather takes us.  If we find an area we love, we can stay longer or if we end up in an area we hate, we can leave.  When we started doing our trailer traveling 11 years ago, we left Petersburg with no itinerary.  Now we have some favorite spots we want to revisit and we have new areas we want to explore so we have some planned destinations but we leave most of the travel unplanned so we can go where our spirit takes us.