Finally, finally, we managed to get away in our campervan for a long weekend in Arizona! After spending most of the summer fixing the van instead of camping in it, we got to Thanksgiving, there was a long weekend ahead of us, most of our camping stuff was in the campervan (our legendary VW Eurovan) and the Eurovan of Doom seemed at the time to be mostly fixed.
So, having emerged unscathed from hosting Thanksgiving dinner for real Americans, we decided to go away in the campervan for some family time seeing America. And for some reason we decided that Arizona was near enough, so we packed some clothes and headed east on the interstate.
Not long after leaving San Diego, we reached a desert area in south eastern California’s Imperial County where people were riding dune buggies and other off-road vehicles. We started to see RV parks that were packed with class A RVs, fifth wheels and toy haulers clustered around campfires with people celebrating. Maybe it was some kind of festival, or just off-road and RV enthusiasts getting together for Thanksgiving, but the atmosphere looked great. But those RV parks were packed, so we didn’t stop there.
I’d always been curious to see what El Centro was like, but it was dark just before we got there. So having finally made it there we didn’t see it. But we did see a big colourful ‘Welcome to Arizona’ sign not long afterwards, and started looking for a nice place to camp in Arizona.
Bearing in mind that it was dark, one of the first things we noticed when we got to Arizona was that all the rest stops were closed. The strange thing was, they all looked like they were closed temporarily, without giving a reason.
We thought we might be able to get to Sonoran Desert National Park, and were heading towards it on the 8 interstate, just north of Mexico, when we started passing deserted Border Control checkpoints. Finally we got to one that was manned, and they pulled us over. Did I have my green card? No one had told me that I should keep it with me. In fact, after all the expense, bureaucracy, medical checks and interviews involved in getting it, I’d thought it was best to keep in safely in a box at home, and only risk taking it out for international travel and starting new jobs. So I didn’t have it with me.
But the Border Patrol people were ok about it: they took my driving license and looked me up from that to make sure it was in order, then told me to travel with my greencard in future. It was a little scary, especially when the kids woke up – however polite they are, it’s scary being questioned by people with guns. But mostly it was a delay, and the evening was getting late.
We saw Painted Rock campsite on the map before Sonoran Desert National Park. Being fans of Native American rock art we decided to head for there instead. We turned off the road at the sign for it, and then we just kept driving in the dark, and driving, and driving, as the road got smaller and smaller.
Being a little nervous from the Border Patrol encounter, after about half an hour with no sign of anyone or anything else on the road it started to remind me of scary stories. “Remember that story about the boat running out of fuel?” I said. “And they kept meeting locals who told them there was a town three miles further up the river, while it got smaller and smaller till they got stuck?” “Or maybe some mutant hunchbacks will jump out and throw spikes in front of the van.”
“This isn’t The Hills Have Eyes, said my long suffering husband. “It does seem deserted though, did we miss the turning somewhere?”
And then, finally, there it was. We drove into a campsite that seemed to be empty and found a spot to set up camp for the night. Finally, the Eurovan came into its own: up went the poptop roof and the kids and their sleeping bags went up there for the night. My husband went off to find the toilets and pay for the camping.
He came back with a funny look on his face. “I can hear coyotes and there’s a sign on the toilets about rabies”, he said. “We’ll see how it looks in the morning.”
Spending the night in the Eurovan was fine. November was not too cold in southern Arizona and the cushions were comfortable. The four of us woke up to early daylight and ate some crunchy junk food snacks I’d bought on the other side of El Centro. Then, instead of fighting about watching kids’ TV the boys ran outside to play football in the desert.
The scenery was stunning. The desert stretched out for miles around us, with a ridge of hills in the distance. I spent some time exploring, and taking photos. The colours really were similar to the ‘Arizona’ desktop colour scheme in my first version of Windows. It seemed an odd thing to be reminded of when surrounded by this starkly beautiful and empty landscape.
Over on one side of the campsite was an odd looking cluster of darker rocks. “I can’t wait to find the painted rock with the petroglyphs,” I thought, without realising that clump of rocks was it. When I finally noticed the petroglyphs, I ran back to fetch my husband and kids.
My four year old was only briefly interested, and much preferred the enormous cacti that must have been at least four times taller than him. My seven year old obligingly looked at everything, while I must have taken about a thousand photos.
There were three different styles of petroglyphs there, representing three different cultural periods. Some had more animals, and some had more grids, but since they were all similarly scratched into the same black rocks and I’m not an expert, the differences weren’t that obvious to me. But having said that it was an awesome feeling to stand among these ancient drawings, wondering what the stories were behind each of them, and knowing that between them they spanned centuries of Native American Indian culture.
When we left Painted Rock, it was still early, so we went the other way to explore, took a wrong turn or two and the road ended up in some kind of closed off military place. Frankly, having seen enough of the X Files, I’d be disappointed not to find that kind of thing in the American desert. So we saw it, took photos, turned around and went back again.
Back on the main road, still quite early, we started to have crazy thoughts like “Maybe we can even take the kids to the Grand Canyon!”
So we headed north to Phoenix, which I also wanted to see because it’s the setting for the TV series ‘Medium’. I’m always puzzled by the family life in Medium. Living in southern Arizona, why do they wear coats, for example? Do they ever really go outside? I’ve heard it can be 120 degrees there in summer, and yet they make it to work in a suit without even looking the slightest bit ruffled. Really, do they go outside?
Phoenix looked like a pleasant city, and not very big. In fact the traffic in Phoenix was so straightforward that we drove right through it, didn’t see anything supernatural, and stopped for breakfast on the other side. And the temperature in November was very pleasant.
We carried on going north, and decided to look for a Gingerbread Village in Prescott that was listed in my Arizona travel guide. And that’s where it all went off the rails for a while. We eventually found Prescott, much further away than we’d thought, on a road that seemed to be lined almost entirely with Arizona RV rentals, RV dealers and maintenance shops.
Once we got to Prescott, it was getting dark, and we looked everywhere (or so we thought) but could not find the resort where the gingerbread village was. Then we couldn’t find the way out of Prescott, and started to notice it was quite a lot colder than Phoenix.
We stopped at a big electronics store to ask the locals the way out of town, but although they were very friendly they didn’t seem to know either. Is it that kind of place, that people never leave? But in the end we found someone who had left town before. So followed his route through town and found it was closed for a Christmas parade, and so we got lost again.
Having stumbled into the Christmas parade, we thought we’d go and see it. It took a long time to find parking, but we just about caught the end of it. I ran with my seven year old to see the last float with Father Christmas waving on the top of it. My four year old saw an older man he thought was Santa, who very kindly went along with it.
The atmosphere in Prescott was fantastic, full of excited children and families bustling around. The main shopping street looked really nice too, with interesting looking small shops that weren’t even chain stores as far as I could tell. It suddenly didn’t seem so strange that the locals might not leave town much.
Most of all, the thorough niceness of the Arizona people was making an impression on us. Consistently, everyone we met was quietly friendly, straightforward and nice. We started to wonder about house prices.
Feeling slightly regretful, we found our way out of Prescott, and only then, on the way out, saw a sign for the resort hosting the gingerbread village, on a hillside on the way out of town. Too late! Instead, we headed towards Flagstaff.
Flagstaff was always our favourite stopping point in northern Arizona when we lived in the San Francisco area and my in-laws lived in Denver. It was often a convenient place to stay on the way to visit them, and we even had our favourite motel, bookshop and pub there. Plus it’s near enough for visiting the Grand Canyon. So although we were looking for a campsite this time, we were keen to go back there again.
The distance wasn’t looking good though. We pressed on as it got colder and darker, looking for campsites on the map, though I was starting to think it might be cold enough to wimp out and get a motel. My husband was determined though: after all those months of getting the Eurovan fixed, there was no way we weren’t staying in it.
As we got further north, the road climbed higher, and we started to see evergreen trees on either side of it, with snow on the ground between them. I wished the kids were awake to see this perfect winter scenery, and hoped we might stop for a forest walk the next day. It was stunningly beautiful, just lovely. I could imagine that inside the forest it was like the snowy forest the children found in Narnia. Somewhere in that forest, I thought, is a doorway to a wardrobe in England. Hmm.
But then, about ten miles south of Flagstaff, it started to snow very heavily and suddenly. Almost immediately, the road was covered in snow and ice. Lorries were either stopped or crawling forward, while cars were sliding all over the place. Within a few minutes, we were seeing cars that had gone off the road. The four wheel drive SUVs that had always seemed so pointless in towns were really coming into their own here.
At first, the Eurovan did ok. We drove forward very slowly, and found it was easiest if we could keep driving in another car’s tracks. But then the hill got steeper, and more of the traffic had stopped in front of us. We reached a very scary point when we couldn’t go forward, but even with the brakes on we couldn’t stop the car from sliding down the hill backwards. We put the hazard lights on and tried to steer into some thicker snow at the side of the road to stop ourselves sliding into anyone else. We couldn’t even call for breakdown assistance, because how on earth could it get there?
We stopped like that for quite a long time, before venturing forwards again and finally getting into another car’s tracks. The traffic was moving very slowly, and after a couple of hours the kids woke up and started crying, but there was no way to stop and sort them out. We saw a sign for a campsite, and got off the road, but the snow was very thick and we couldn’t see a safe way to go, or to park, so we turned back onto the main road again.
Just as we got moving again, a sheriff’s car pulled us over. He was very nice despite our youngest screaming in the back (those Arizona people again!). Apparently our tail lights weren’t working, and he gave us a form to send back once we’d got them fixed. He said the campsite was closed, so we should head into town about three miles further. Then either the road got flatter or the traction was slightly better, and feeling very lucky we finally made it to Flagstaff, never to forget to take mountain weather seriously again.
We looked for another campsite that was signposted but again, couldn’t find it in the snow. So we turned the other way and there, thank God, was a Walmart. And however much Walmart do some things that don’t seem right, there’s one thing about them that is truly fantastically wonderful and that is that RVs can camp in their parking lots free overnight (in most Walmarts anyway). So we slid our way into the car park and found an area with several other RVs that were obviously camping too.
It was much too cold for the kids to sleep up in the pop top roof this time. We headed into the Walmart where, even with their low prices, we spent easily as much as a campsite would have cost on woolly hats and extra warm things. We put on all the warm things, got into our sleeping bags and blankets in the van and huddled together for a night that was completely and bitterly freezing. Thankfully I was the only one awake for it, but I could tell that if I’d been Scott of the Antarctic’s friend Titus, there’s no way I’d have ‘gone outside for a while’, no way, they’d have been stuck with me.
In the morning, we went back into Walmart for even more warm things, coffee and nearby doughnuts, and then we came out to this wonderland of snow. The kids made footsteps and played with snowballs. They were so excited, and as we looked around at our kids having fun in this Walmart parking lot wonderland, we thought “this is the life, no one can say we never take our kids anywhere…”
Then we took them on a long trip west again. The road soon got lower and flatter, and I kept trying to take photos of the tumbleweed as it bounced across the road in front of us. It was fun, although we were realising the trip was much too far for a long weekend.
So we thought we’d break up our trip by stopping on the way back for lunch in Lake Havasu City, to see the British stuff and maybe stock up on some sweets and things from home. It was shocking what we found there. London Bridge was still there, looking as fine and solid as ever. It reminded me of the bridges I’ve crossed many times in the real London. But all the British theme shops were closed, and very dilapidated looking. In fact, almost everything next to London Bridge was closed. There was an old abandoned red phone box that was vandalised and broken – not nearly as effectively as it would have been on a London housing estate, but still, sad to see. We left Lake Havasu City feeling sad and a little homesick, and not in the mood for lunch any more.
After Lake Havasu City, we were back in a desert land of spindly ocotillo bushes and less frequent tumbleweed, with dusty hills punctuated by the occasional exotic looking lakeside golf resorts. We finally stopped for a very late lunch on the California border.
The Arizona road trip tested our campervan to its limits and beyond. So the Eurovan goes back to the garage for more RV repairs and maintenance. But it’s good to have finally used it for what we bought it for: its so nice to have a campervan, to travel wherever seems like a good idea (even if it turns out in some ways not to be!), and to stop for the night fairly easily. And to get home without getting into a road traffic accident claim.
We were keen to get back home, but at the same time sorry to leave Arizona. Suddenly California seemed so unnecessarily businesslike, and the people smiley, but not so genuine. And the Walmarts (we found later) don’t have the warm clothes and useful camping gear like they do in Arizona. But it’s the beginning of a new age of camping trips for our family and the campervan.
