EscaPOD Adventures

complain, complain, complain

Time to start writing about our first major 2018 trip.

This one was again out west to see our daughters and their families. Our trip lasted over a month and covered 6481.4 miles (not all of it towing, but most of it was). We also fulfilled a lifelong dream of seeing some major sights. This was also the major test of our new Hensley Cub hitch.

Our first leg was from North Carolina to Tempe, AZ. We went along I40 with a detour off there to visit a friend in Oklahoma. The trip was uneventful, in part because the Hensley hitch does indeed work better than the Equal-i-zer which I had been using. I would always feel the wiggle when a truck was passing us before. With the Hensley, a number of them sneak up on me as I don't get that wiggle. I still do get a push from some of the flat-front busses and RVs that passed us, but it is not a wiggle from the hitch pivoting. Overall, I rate the Hensley hitch very highly. The one instance that concerned me was when we hit what would have been a dust devil if it had been over dirt but was not visible. It did catch the truck and nudged it harder than any of the trucks that passed us. Perhaps because it was rotating, it introduced a different type of force. It was not enough to be dangerous, but it did remind me that I am still towing a sail. This happened a little later in the trip, but I was discussing the hitch here, so I mentioned it here. After that, I put the Hayes No-Sway back on as an additional safety measure. The one thing I think is different is that the Hensley hitch seems to cause a rougher ride in the R-Pod as we would find things on the floor that previously had stayed in place.

After we left Oklahoma, it was back onto I40 for the trip to Tempe. That is, until I saw the sign for Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. A quick check of the map and I saw that it would not take us too far out of our way. I was able to use the Access pass to go in to the park and we drove the length of the road, stopping to take pictures and stopping at the gift shops to pick up souvenirs. Among them are two batches of petrified wood to go into our rock tumbler to be polished. Hopefully, we will get some good pieces to the turned into jewelry when they are done. We did not get back onto 40 for the trip into Tempe, but instead were on a combination of back roads and roads through national forest lands. It turns out that after we went through, a fire broke out in the area we had been on not too many days before. We did not have any problems, but had we come later, we would have.

We had a good visit with our younger daughter and her two boys in Tempe, AZ. We spent several days there. They were busy with helping to get some jobs done that had been postponed but needed doing.

We left our younger daughter's house after spending several days visiting and helping with a number of projects which she had not been able to get to after her move. We plugged in the GPS for South Jordan, Utah, figuring we would be taken up through Las Vegas since that seemed like it would be the fastest way. Instead, we traveled up 17 to Flagstaff where we saw a sign for Meteor Crater. This was also a place I had wanted to visit, so we made the 30 mile trip east to get to the access road and then drove almost another 6 miles to get to the crater.

What can one say? It is a BIG hole in the ground. It was interesting to see that NASA used the area to train for the moon landings. It was quite windy, especially near the rim where it seemed the side of the crater was accelerating the wind.

After leaving the crater, we drove west on I40 toward Flagstaff and then turned off on US89N We drove through some beautiful landscape on our way north through Arizona. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, like the Painted Desert, is very colorful.

We continued on to Page, AZ where we stopped for the night. We had, unfortunately, run out of daylight before we got there so we did not get a good view of what was probably some pretty spectacular scenery heading into the Grand Canyon area.