The Wilson Wilderness.......

1:06 pm - Tuesday - October 22nd - Wilson Wilderness, AZ - 75° F, humidity 17%, wind 4 mph out of the south....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 77° F.  On this date in 2017 TLE and I were hiking the Fairyland Trail in Bryce Canyon NP.....

Unlike the previous 6 days we've been on the road, we were up before 6:30 am Monday morning.  Monday would be our last day of travel before reaching our winter destination....The Wilson Wilderness in Northern Arizona.  Yup, the cat is out of the bag now.  You won't find The Wilson Wilderness on any map, but it exists....7 miles from pavement, and 32 miles from the nearest town, which is not a very big town.  Anyway, I get slightly ahead of myself.

We were in the process of organizing the coach for travel when I heard a knock at our door....hmmm....who could that be at 6:40 am in the morning?  I opened door to a very familiar face, but I could not immediately put a name to her.  She said, "you probably don't remember me, but my name is Sandy....".  I immediately knew who she was, Sandy Dittus, with whom we worked with at Tahoe Valley Campground from the summer of 2014 to the summer of 2017.....

.....it has been 7 years since we last saw Sandy.  She lives in Henderson, NV, just a few miles from the Walmart.  We've been friends on Facebook for years now, and she saw my post about overnighting at the Walmart near the In 'N Out Burger, and took a chance that we were still there, and drove over at 6:30 am in the morning to see if she could catch us before we left, and she did!  We invited her into the coach, and talked until after 7:30 am.  What an amazing, serendipitous occasion.

We did some morning shopping at the Walmart, and after putting our purchases away were rolling our wheels ever southward by 9 am.  We would be meeting up with our friends about 8 miles from their property at 2 pm, and they would lead us into their property.  We had around 156 miles to drive Monday, and that should take us around 3-4 hours, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to make a couple of stops, one to refuel the Newell, and still get there on time.

As you will remember, the previous two days were amazing driving days, but Murphy's Law dictates that there will always be a bad day, and Monday was a bad day.  Bad in the sense that the road conditions on US-93 were some of the worst we have traversed in recent memory.  When the road is rough, it makes 156 miles feel like 300.  Nevertheless, we continued our journey.  Around 11:30 am we stopped at a Travel Center of American truck stop to take on fuel.  The posted price was $3.56/gallon, but with our TDS discount card we paid just $3.03/gallon.....we took on 115+ gallons, and saved $48!  We got an amazing 7.5 miles/gallon on our last tank of diesel, which is around 1 mpg better than our usual 6.5 mpg!

The pump price, but we paid just $361.94

.....from the TCA station it was just 96 more miles to our destination meet up place.  The road continued to deteriorate mile after mile.  At least we reached the Interstate, which was even worse, if that is possible, than US-93.  Finally, we exited the Interstation for a secondary road with just 50 miles to go.  We arrived at our meetup place around 1:30 pm, and saw that our friends had just arrived....perfect timing.  From there it was another 30 minutes of driving on a 'Primitive Road' to our destination for the next 6 months.

By the time we had parked in what will be a temporary location, and set up camp it was getting close to 4:30 pm, so we headed into the house for an early dinner, wine, and conversation.  Eventually the sun began to set, and we got our first amazing sunset here.....

Thanks for stopping by!