We drove this leg of our trip in 2 days. First day, Winterhaven California to Gila Bend Arizona. Basically you get on I 8 and head east. 122.5 miles, easy peasy day, nice. We packed up, hooked up, hit the road and were in our campsite by 2 PM. Not sure how we did that, other than the mileage was short, but, we did! LOL
Most of the drive was desert (aka, FLAT land), with mountains and outcrops here and there - - - but there was this little issue of coming down a hill, well, a mountain, Gila Mountain to be exact. Just east of Fortuna Arizona, you climb Gila Mountain and go through Telegraph Pass. Ya, know that ride UP the mountain just did not seem to be anything significant. HOWEVER, the grade DOWN the east side of the mountain is 6%. At the top you will see a suggested speed limit 45 MPH, and signs that advise you that the next bit of highway is curvy. The photos will not do this justice. Big Butt and the Allison transmission were screaming, holding our speed well, doing what they are engineered to do. Sony and Carol were shooting photos as fast as we could, which was not fast enough in some respects, but OK. One of these days I will remember to do video instead! LOL
Down we go!
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| Dome Valley. On the other side of the mountain.
Some time later we spied lots of milk cows. LOTS. They were growing their own feed (hay, or grasses, orwhatever you feed milk cows), acres and acres of feed. Stretched on for miles, it seemed. I did a Google Earth search, and determined it was this area around Theba, Arizona.
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I blew up one specific area, I believe these are the stalls (or whatever they are called) where the milk cows are kept, eat, get milked, and eat again. All the fields around are planted, or are about to be planted with feed for the cows. (Clicking on the graphic for the larger image would be helpful here, remember, click the back button on your browser to return.)
We had a nice afternoon and evening at our stop in Gila Bend, took some fabulous sunset photos. The next day we drove the rest of the way. Route was I 8 east to I 10, take 10 north for just a few miles, jump on 287 which you take east, north, and east once again until you get to Florence. At Florence jump on 79 and go north to 60 where you turn slightly west but mostly north. It was 115 miles, to Gold Canyon, near Apache Junction, Arizona where we will spend the next month.
* While researching this post, trying to discover the name of the mountain (Gila) and the pass (Telegraph), I also discovered this interesting set of web pages, I'll bet some of our RVing friends knew about this, but, it is new to me, AARoads, where they let you see the road before you go. Oh, my, wonder how many hours I can spend on this web site??
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1 comment:
Always nice to see where you went, a good view from the road as well as from space. Enjoy your time in Apache Junction.
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