We’ve been in Wickenburg, Arizona since May 29th – that’s seven full weeks! It’s been so long here that it feels like home; we catch ourselves saying things like “Oh it’s so nice today, it’s only 103° outside!” Fun fact – if you leave a plastic clamshell container on the dashboard of your truck in the Arizona sun, it will turn back into a perfectly flat, unmolded piece of plastic. Also, don’t hug the cactus. Even if they appear very friendly, like the Teddy-bear Chollo variety, they are not – admire from a distance.

All joking aside, we’re sad to leave this place that now feels like a second home, and also excited to be on the road again. We had a fantastic time here, with frequent (almost daily) trips to the swimming pool to cool off, bicycle adventures in and around the desert, a trip to Lake Pleasant (where I swam the whole way across), adventures in Sedona and Jerome, and more than our fair share of awesome sunset scenes. We’ll definitely be returning to the area; we have a lot more to see.

We did have a little maintenance in Arizona. The air conditioner on our rig couldn’t keep up with the extreme heat, so I picked up a window unit and cut out some plywood to frame it into a side window. With two AC’s on full blast, we were able to keep the temp inside the rig in the 70’s. I also took Kristin’s truck door apart (again) to finally install a new handle…and then again to reconnect the inside handle that I didn’t get right the first time…and then again when the Arizona heat melted some internal wiring and her window would go down but not up.

The heat also melted some other wiring in the truck. The power mirrors are now manual, for example. The brake booster also went out, and it appears the failure caused the brakes on all four corners to burn up. Not a cheap repair, but completed just in time to hit the road.

Here’s some pictures, highlights, and points of interest we discovered while here:

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-Adam