Joshua Tree, CA to Mesa, AZ

We left our accommodation in Yucca Valley at 0715 (which as you know, is very early for us – see, we can do it!) heading for Mesa (near Phoenix), just on 300 miles away. The route took us through Joshua Tree Nat Park again, but this time on the North-west to South-easy direction. Turn left onto the Interstate 10 (I-10), and 90 miles of next to nothing to the Arizona border, then 140-odd miles of pretty much the same towards Phoenix. The landscape is pretty desolate, all desert, long straight roads, and long rolling hills with very little in the way of trees and greenery. Hot outside the car (34 deg), so tried not to stop except for food, coffee, and to swap drivers.


Arrived in Mesa late in the evening and stopped at a Service (Gas) Station. Sharman asked where we could find accommodation – the girl didn’t understand – seems that she didn’t know what “accommodation” was – and that was not our accent, either! Eventually somebody else came to her rescue and said “You know, like a Motel.” Then the penny dropped. We are not into The Simpsons, but in this case, Homer had it right – Duh!

Enough of talking about the driving – bor-ring!

All along this time, we had been trying to choose and organise cell phone. The options are quite different from NZ. You have to choose between 9 or 10 suppliers; contract or no contract; levels of ‘free’ calling minutes; per minute rates; and then there are all the add-on options, like; texting; international calling; voicemail; call waiting; etc. And of course, each different provider has packaged things differently from the others, so as to make it hard to compare one against the other. You definitely need to know your calling volumes, other needs, and do a comparison based on those numbers. Much more options and complexity than in NZ.

Anyway, the best looking choice turned out to be hopeless. Their so called ‘Service’ number is just a joke – they simply don’t answer it – ever! It turns out that they are based in Puerto Rico, and align themselves with the Hispanic population, although we had spoken to a few (Caucasian) people who recommended them. The problem was that they did not activate International Calling, as purchased, and we could not talk to them to have it fixed. So that was worse than useless. When we took it back to Radio Shack and said that we wanted to return the phone, the girl immediately asked, “Problem with the service?” - seems to be an extremely common event. She was brilliant! We had decided on AT&T, and she agreed that would suit us best. Then she did everything necessary, activated the phone, added International calling, set up the monthly direct debit, etc, etc - all of the things that you normally have to do yourself here. While it is more expensive than the first option, and we were surprised to discover that in the US, both the caller and the person called are charged for the call, one of the main cost components for us is the Telecom termination charges. Does anybody know what is happening about the govt investigation into that?

Enough of phones and pseudo-service departments. Now we finally have a working phone, and we have talked our way through a couple of hundred dollars in the first week or so. But at least we can phone home.

By now in this chat, some of you will be starting to ask ‘Why Mesa?’ Well, that’s easy. This is one of the places that we had been told would be good place to buy an RV. A lot of snowbirds come here. (Snowbird: A person who normally lives in the northern States or Canada, who heads south for the winter to escape the snow at home.) Other popular Snowbird destinations include Sun City and Tuscon. Mesa seems to be quite popular because of its proximity to Phoenix and Scottsdale, which are quite popular. So there are lots of RV parks, and lots of RV sales places.

Mesa itself is totally spread out and flat. It is laid out in one-mile grids. A grid block might have some private homes, a gated community and perhaps an RV park. In a couple of cases, it looks like an RV community takes up an entire block. Every couple of miles you find a mall, a cluster of shops, and some food places. We found that we would do quite a lot of miles driving around the sides of the square to get someplace – there are absolutely no diagonal roads anywhere. One thing that made driving tolerable was the freeway system. From where we stayed, we went 3 miles south to a freeway, or 4 miles north to another one that also runs east-west. A third freeway going north-south was a bit further away, about 10 miles along the east-west links. Once we got used to it, it worked very well.

While we were looking for our motorhome, we stayed at the Day’s Inn Motel. Naturally, we became friendly with the people working there. Here are Laurie, Sharman, Doris and Megan. Summer was off the day we took the pics, sorry Summer.

Sharman being Sharman was not keen to have her photo taken. She says she does not do photos any more, but decided to make an exception this time because we became so friendly with these lovely people, who made our long stay at this motel an absolute pleasure. Thanks guys.

The weather here is hot and dry. Temperatures up to 95F (35C), then a day of so of 64F (16C) - (bliss!). It is Spring, after all. Days are clear and fine, and it looks like rain is quite rare. Everything is so dry. You can tell the people who water their lawn and garden – those are the green ones. Everything else is dust. One garden option that seems quite popular is to just give up on any idea of cultivation, and just put down gravel, or something similar. Done right, it looks OK, and makes good sense in the desert climate.

Next: Finding a Motorhome