We originally planned on spending a week in Flagstaff, Arizona after the Grand Canyon. Flagstaff was one of the cities that popped up on our radar as a potential place to land when this trip was over. It is a mountain college town with a good ski resort within fifteen minutes of downtown. As our Flagstaff time approached, the weather began to look a little uninviting with high temperatures in the 40s and lows in the low teens. There was also a decent chance of snow. So, we decided to change our plans and flee south with the rest of the western snowbirds (people who migrate south in the winter in their RVs to avoid the cold) to central Arizona.
I am glad we changed our plans. Flagstaff ended up getting a couple feet of snow when we would have been there. Flagstaff sits at about 8,000 feet so it gets mountain weather even though it is in sunny Arizona. We did spend a couple hours in Flagstaff on our way to Prescott, our first stop in central Arizona, though. We liked Flagstaff, or at least what we saw in the few hours we were there. The area around Flagstaff was beautiful. We talked to a woman who lived there and she loved it and raved about all the outdoor recreation right outside her door. It was already starting to snow as we were driving into town, so we didn’t stick around very long and made our way to Prescott.
Prescott
Jamie had seen a picture from a campground somewhere in Prescott (pronounced Pres-cut) and it looked awesome. So, we figured what the heck let’s visit it. There was rain and cold weather in the forecast, so we wanted a campground with full hookups where we could hunker down. We found a campground called Point of Rocks that was surrounded by large granite rock features and boulders. We ended up in a great site that looked out over the rocks and the Arizona mountains.
It was supposed to rain the first day that we were in Prescott. We promised Archer that we were going to visit the local climbing wall when we were there if there was a rain-day. She was super psyched for that. We ended up finding a great climbing gym there where we could all climb for the afternoon. A couple hours into climbing, we looked outside and the snow was pounding down. Luckily, it was still a bit above freezing, so the snow kept off of the roads. They were not so lucky further north where we just came from. Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon both got buried by snow.
There were trails that lead out of the campground to a beautiful lake, Lake Watson. We all had a great time exploring those trails. I went trail running every day we were there, we went hiking, we went mountain biking, and we even tried our hands at disc golf. Disc golf turned out to be a lot harder than I had figured. We spent a good chunk of our time looking for the discs (I am trying to not call them Frisbees) that we had borrowed from the campground office. The course was full of desert rocks, bushes, and trees. I am glad we were not there in the summer when there were probably plenty of rattlesnakes waiting in those bushes. The hiking was awesome. We climbed and scrambled over the boulders. The mountain biking trails went around the lake and were part of a 50+ mile circuit. Way to go, Prescott.
Jamie and I got to go out on a date night while we were in Prescott. That’s one of the advantages of traveling with other people. We went to a great gastro-pub in downtown and had a nice quiet table in the corner. The table next to us was really close so we could not help but overhear their conversation. At one point they started talking about some full-time RV families that had YouTube channels, so I had to ask them, “I couldn’t help but overhear you guys. Do you live in an RV?” They said, “Yes!” I told them we did to and when we compared Instagram handles, it turns out that we already followed one another. They were a young couple working and traveling full-time while doing lots of mountain biking and they were there with a friend also traveling full time. What a small world!
Cottonwood
We left Prescott and headed to Cottonwood. Jamie had always wanted to visit Sedona. We could not find a campground with availability in Sedona, so we ended up staying in Cottonwood. I am glad we did because we ended up discovering a great state park there, Dead Horse Ranch. Dead Horse had trails from the campground we stayed at that we could mountain bike or trail run on – always a positive in my book. We even got to hang out at a great little brewery in Cottonwood called That Brewery.
We visited Sedona a couple days when we were in Cottonwood. Sedona is an absolutely beautiful town. It is surrounded by large red cliffs and mountains that supposedly have energy vortexes in them. So, the town has somewhat of a new age vibe to it. I get the feeling that Sedona was a really cool place twenty or thirty years ago before development took over and before the hippies that lived there started golfing. It seemed very crowded for a town of only 10,000 people. There were huge homes everywhere in town and in the surrounding hills. The traffic was backed up on the one main road on both sides of town, even on a weekday. A whole lot of other people got the memo on how beautiful this place was. The secret is definitely out.
Sedona more than makes up for the development and crowds with its beauty and outdoor recreation. There was a really good system of trails around town with lots of hiking and mountain biking. We did not get a chance to mountain bike here, but we saw plenty of people doing it and it looked great. We did get to hike up a mountain called Castle Rock though. The trail climbed straight up a mountain side with plenty of class 3 scrambling (requiring the use of hands). There are great views from the top of the hike and apparently there is an energy vortex on the mountain. Jamie felt a shock of energy climbing the mountain. Yep, that was weird.
Gila Bend
Gila Bend was our next stop in central Arizona. If you are from Arizona, you are probably asking yourself the same question people kept asking us. “Why are you going to Gila Bend? There is nothing there?” As we were working our way south, we thought Phoenix would be a good destination for Thanksgiving. We had friends that lived there, it was supposed to be nice and warm, and it is supposed to be a cool town. We started looking for a campground there and quickly realized that there are hundreds of them. I guess Phoenix is a snowbird destination because a lot of them were booked, a lot were 55 plus, and a lot had crappy websites that made you call them to see if there was availability. After looking unsuccessfully for a while, I threw in the towel and pulled up my KOA app. There was one to the east of Phoenix and one to the west in Gila Bend. Since we were headed west to Joshua Tree next, the west won. Gila Bend it was. The sunsets alone were worth it.
The KOA that we ended up staying at in Gila Bend was really nice. They had a heated swimming pool, huge sites, and a gate out the back that lead to miles of trails in the desert for some good running. Since we couldn’t fit a turkey into our miniature oven or on our portable grill, we decided to have a Mexican fiesta for Thanksgiving with the Prices. When in Rome, right? Mandy was able to bake a pumpkin pie and chocolate pumpkin cheesecake in our oven, so at least we were able to have those Thanksgiving staples. We have so much to be thankful for and being able to spend Thanksgiving with family, even this far away from “home”, was a blessing.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is time for Virginia Tech Hokies football and beating the University of Virginia Hoos! It is practically a tradition as we had beat them fifteen years in a row. We even had cable to be able to watch the game! Well, uh, we lost. Enough about that… At least some of the UVa players are great people. Virginia’s starting quarterback texted Scott before the game and said he was going to play the game for Rowan, our cousin who died from Leukemia a couple months ago. That is one awesome dude even though he kicked out butts.
We had friends from Phoenix join us in their camper in Gila Bend for the weekend after Thanksgiving. One of Smith’s friends from school had moved to Phoenix about six months ago, so we all had a blast catching up with them. Smith and Spencer got to spend some good quality time on the Xbox, which made them pretty happy. We all went to a great a great park about an hour and a half south of Gila Bend, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It was a large desert park with rugged mountains and numerous species of cacti including the huge Saguaro and Organ Pipe cacti. It was right on the border with Mexico, so there were warning signs up about human and drug trafficking. Luckily, we saw none of that. We did see a pretty good presence of Border Control agents, so we felt pretty safe the whole time. The park was beautiful and it was amazing being able to get that close to cacti that were often over twenty feet tall.
Goodbye, Arizona
From the Grand Canyon to the Mexican border, we had a great time in Arizona. It seems that most of the state is a desert, but it is a beautiful and, dare I say, lush desert. Before Arizona, the weather on our trip had been awesome. There were only a couple rainy days out of the nearly five months we had been on the road. However, once we reached the desert state of Arizona, we started getting rain and snow every other day or so. We were lucky we made it south to Gila Bend since Prescott got sixteen inches of snow shortly after we left. We will continue our adventures in the desert by heading into California to visit Joshua Tree and Death Valley to more wide open (and hopefully sunny) skies.
