More Projects than Tourist in Tucson

Saturday morning we moved out of the packed lot at the Wild Horse Casino just south of Phoenix headed south towards towards Tucson.  It was a fairly short day with travel about 115 miles or so.  Just as expected Jerry and Janice were waiting for us.  Well, at least Jerry was.  He came cycling in on his bike at the office to greet us. After we were parked, we met at the park’s restaurant for a snack.  They had their list of planned activities in hand.

Picacho Peak 

The Voyager RV park is huge.  When I say huge I really mean HUGE.  This park is so big it’s almost the size of the little town our kids live in.  We are parked way in back and in the pet section.  It’s almost in another county from the rest of the park.  I certainly understand that only in the largest of parks can they have the facilities this one has.  There are several pools, several spas, entertainment, a restaurant and dozens of crafts.  I want all that stuff but it's still quite a bit bigger than we normally like.

The sign at the entrance indicates it’s been voted the best RV park in the nation.  Who votes for these things?

Voyager is part of the Encore Park system and owned by ELS, the same company that owns Thousand Trails. Even though it’s really not part of the Thousand Trails membership park system,  special rates are given for 7 days.  The bad thing is they have certain sites for those 7 days and if you decide to stay another week, you have to move out of that site and into another.  In other words, no matter what we decide to do we still have to move.  

We made another discovery and that is it’s not quite as easy to get everything accomplished we wanted to.  I can tell you right now that most of the things on my bucket list or on my  to do list aren’t going to happen. The more I look at my list the smaller that list gets because I keep crossing things off.  We’ve had to prioritize.  Most of it has been axed except for the projects.

Project number one was to put a booth back in our motorhome.  We discovered that isn’t easy either when you’re on the road.  We even tried to get one built.  That was next to impossible in the time frame we wanted.  Oh well, we did find an alternative.  Now we just need to do a little staining and figure out the cushions.

Jerry and Janice at Museum

We’ve visited with Jerry and Janice bunches and often that was over food.  There is a really great little restaurant at the park plus we did find time for Texas Roadhouse.  That’s one of our favorite steak restaurants ever.

Jets waiting to be recalled to duty

Other than running back and forth for supplies for our projects, we did visit the Pima Air and Space Museum. You can check out the details for the museum here. The museum is one of the largest air and space museums in the world.  They have old planes, older planes and damaged planes.  Rows and rows of all types of planes and jets fill acres and acres of land.  One thing we wanted to do was take the tour of the airplane “boneyard”.    We saw thousands of planes including commercial planes, helicopters and military planes of all sizes and types.  We also saw thousands of parts.

Engines that may be used again

Throw away engines

In one area planes are just stored.  The white covering covers sensitive parts and the planes can be used again if needed.  In another area the planes are disassembled and parts used for repairs.  The planes are kept in this location until all parts are removed and then they are chopped into pieces and the metal recycled. With thousands of planes still sitting on the fields, we wondered when they last reclycled.  We assumed it must have been at the beginning of time.

A communication plane that flies with the President's plane

We toyed and toyed with whether we should stay another week or whether we should move down the road after our week was up.  We’ve decided that Saturday we will be on the road again.  We figure  If we have to move, we might as well really move.  We like the Tucson area and could see spending more time here in the future. We’ve been too busy with projects this time to bore you with everything we’ve done over the last few days.  Today is a play day though.  After a trip to JoAnn’s,  I’m going to a genealogy forum and then we’re doing a concert in the evening. Tomorrow I'm meeting a "new" third cousin.  We connected through DNA about nine months ago.  She lives in Tucson. In a few weeks I'm meeting another DNA matched relative in Texas.

Would we stay at Voyager again?  We’re not sure.   There is always something going on and there are many classes I’d like to attend.  There are also some great RV sites in the park but just not where we were assigned.  Since the blocks are so long people tend to cut through everyone else’s site. We might come back if we could pick our site.

‘Tis life on the road

They say money doesn't bring happiness, but everyone still wants to prove it for themselves.