It's not a slow car, it's a fast house

April 2021

 

After cruising across the USA in Big Bertha, we faced a tough decision.  Our friends in Prescott provided us just the space and opportunity to make that decision.  They needed a house/dog sitter and we needed a place to stay!  So we moved back to Prescott, Arizona!

The view from my favorite sofa was absolutely amazing.  The house gave us the peace and quiet we needed to settle down.  The dogs loved playing in the huge yard.

We enjoyed the scenery, the gardens and the responsibility of caring for a full sized home for a while.  The butterfly in the gardens was a reminder to slow down and breathe.  The city offered the services we needed to get reacquainted with the USA.

 

 

This lovely home offered a perfect space to invite the kids and the grand babies to come for a visit.  It was a stormy, sultry weekend but we had an amazing time together.  Watching two of the cousins play together.  Observing our adult children wear the role of parenting.  Seeing how these wonderful humans worked together with the precious little lives they had created.  Such joy!

 

While in Prescott, we both became a little ill.  Maybe the traveling, maybe the stress, maybe the exposure to so many new people.  But Geneva did not get over it and ended up in the emergency room.  The world was still fearful of COVID (remember, that is why we were stuck in Brazil so long) and Geneva was not allowed in to the waiting area.  She was given a blanket and told to wait outside.  These photos are her sleeping on a bench in front of the hospital! We were surprised by the unpleasantness and costs of the American medical system, after so many terrific experiences in Latin America.

But all this time we had been pondering the decision of what to do about a rig for our time in the USA.  We really did enjoy the comforts of that beautiful Safari Trek with the raise/lower bed and the fancy bathroom.  But for our style of traveling, Big Bertha was just too large for us!  We opted to sell Big Bertha and build out another truck camper.

In Prescott we found a truck to use as the base for a new USA rig.  This (photo below) older, red Chevrolet would do just fine.  The truck could tow a VW.  And had the suspension to support a heavy truck camper.  So, we were on the hunt for a camper to place with Red Rover- the Chevrolet truck. 

 

It didn’t take long to locate a Lance camper in the Phoenix area that would suit our needs and fit perfectly on Red Rover. So Red Rover and Lance became a pair and we started personalizing the unit. Our USA rig version 2.0 was now underway.

 

 

Then we took a few wonderful camping trips.  We camped nearby on Mingus Mountain.  We camped with my sister in the woods near Flagstaff.  And we drove across the Arizona desert to camp in the Kiabab near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  That is always one of Geneva’s favorite locations.

But after the long, hot, haul across the desert, Red Rover started giving us some mechanical trouble.  It was time to make yet another decision.  Do we put more money into the old truck, do we sell the whole unit, do we look for a new truck……..

 

The breakdowns were a hassle, for sure.  But the day we broke down outside of Sedona, Arizona, the sky offered  this incredible photo opportunity!  Please ignore the bug on the windshield.

We spent a few days at a friends home in the Sedona area.  She needed a house/dog sitter, and we had a dead truck.  Sometimes everything works out just as it should in life!

Walking Pacha (with her supermodel gait), along the red concrete sidewalks of Sedona, Arizona, gave us a lot of time to think.  We made our decisions and set out to follow through.

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