Saturday August 19th

I set off early to return the hire car at the airport and then catch the plane. There wasn't a lot of traffic on the Saturday, and it was an interesting drive. I went over one long bridge, I think the San Mateo Bridge, and had a good view of the bay as I went over. All was going well until the car GPS directed me to the wrong place, a closed Hertz sales centre, not the car return! I had read about the way to get to the car return, and I hadn’t been directed that way, and I did wonder why.

So there I was next to a closed car sales place, and the car had no other record of any Hertz place. So I had to look it up on the phone, and then follow the prompts mostly just listening because I didn't have the time to fish around and get the cradle for the phone, and couldn’t see the phone and drive at the same time. Because of this I missed a couple of turns again! Though I had left early, time was ticking away now, and I really thought I would at least not get my luggage on the flight.

I did get to the car drop off, and thankfully you could just leave the car and run, so I hot footed it to the elevated monorail which shuttled to the terminal I needed. I had to wait in line then to have my passport checked (even though it was a domestic flight) and then again to go through the security screening. My case turned out to be something like 500g overweight, and they told me I had to take something out, so I took out another jacket and wore it around my waist, and got it close enough to 50 lbs that they let it through. So everything worked out ok thank the Lord.

I was taking a Southwest Airlines flight, and they had the unusual feature that there were no assigned seats. Once you got on the plane, you just went to whatever seat was free. The way it worked was that everyone was given a boarding order. I think this depended on how early you checked in online. I paid a bit extra to be automatically checked in before the general checkins were opened, which gave me something like position 33.

We all lined up in order of our position. There were lanes for different position ranges, and within that lane, it seemed like people just asked other people what their positions were. Someone asked me what my number was, and we arranged ourselves in order. I got a good window seat when I got on.

The plane left nearly an hour late. It was cloudy leaving San Francisco, but I had a good view from time to time, and saw a large lake which I thought might be the Hoover Dam, but I found out later was the also large San Luis Reservoir. Further along were some some snow capped mountains, which I thought was amazing in August, which is late summer there. I think these may have been the mountains near Mammoth Lakes which I drove back to later. Over the mountains I got a peek through the clouds at a very bare looking area which I suspect was Death Valley. It looked quite like what I had seen in photos or satellite images.

Coming in to Phoenix about 45 minutes later, the area looked extremely dry, like a desert. There was a lake near the city, but it was surrounded by what looked to be dry, treeless hills and plains. I was booked in to collect the campervan at 1pm, and the flight arrived after 12, because it had left late. I hadn’t had time to get breakfast – I thought I would get it at the airport, but I was so late that I didn’t get a chance. So I got some lunch at a weird little kiosk that was unmanned, and you had to check things out yourself, then waited for my luggage, and eventually got it, while eating.

I got an Uber to get to the Escape Campervans place not far from the airport. This worked very well, and the driver was at the meeting point not long after I got there. We had an interesting chat. He had been a homicide detective, now retired, and enjoyed driving, earning $80k per year he said, having studied what times weren't being serviced, and starting his availability at 2am.

I gathered that I was the only person collecting a van at the campervan place the entire day, so there were no delays. They had decided to upgrade me to the next model up, because they weren't confident about the older low end models doing 10,000 miles. What a blessing that proved to be! The newer one had a reversing camera, which saved my bacon more than once, and also a second row of seats, which was perfect for storing my case in. It would have been much more difficult and cramped with the other model. The van was nicely painted with desert type scenes, its name was "Hot Ride".

I’d ordered a lot of optional extras, like a table and chairs, some netting you could put over the windows when they were open at night to stop insects coming in (which I didn’t end up needing), bedding and kitchen kits, and a gas bottle. They added in an extra doona when I asked for it.

The lady showing me around was nice. I got my luggage into the van, found a way to attach my phone holder, and got things a little organised then headed off to navigate to a shopping centre for supplies. I set up my phone's cradle and successfully navigated to the big shopping centre I wanted to get to. With driving on the other side, and the size of the van, I was not good at getting the van parked correctly in a parking spot! I parked well away from everyone else in the large parking lot, which had a lot of space free on the Saturday.

I went to AT&T to get a sim, but though it had appeared from their website when I’d researched this earlier, that my phone would be ok, their systems said it was not compatible. Thankfully I was able to just keep roaming with Telstra, which was pretty reasonable, it was something like $25 for two weeks with 4GB of data and 100 minutes of calls. I just kept buying another two weeks each time it ran out or was about to. 2GB a week wasn't a lot, but I was able to stay within it.

I stopped at a camping store, one of a bit chain called REI, and a sports store nearby, and got got a sleeping bag for extra warmth, camping lantern, watter bottles, and other camping and hiking supplies. I had wanted to get some foot warmers which didn’t need power – they used some chemical process and apparently lasted twelve hours. But in Phoenix in the summer, where the temperatures were in the 40s, they didn’t have them in stock! REI had a membership program which looked very attractive if I had lived in the US, but was not much use to me since I would probably not need camping supplies there again, or not for a long time.

Then I headed to Walmart for the first time. It was huge, and had food, cleaning products, a pharmacy, gas bottles, all sorts of things. Apparently some Walmarts sold guns, but I didn’t see any there, and though I was curious as to whether they really did have guns in supermarkets, I didn’t really want to ask! I spent maybe two hours getting everything I needed for the camping trip, pretty much a full trolley, for about $550 Australian.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to locate some of the things on my long list. Then the mountain of stuff took quite a while for the checkout person to scan and put into bags. Once I got it all into the parking lot, it was a fairly long job again to pack it all away in the campervan bag by bag, finding places for everything in the drawers under the bed, and other nooks and crannies.

So by the time I arrived at the RV park I had booked into, it was about 8, but I had understood someone would be there till 8.30. Google first directed me to some kind of back entrance which was locked. Then somehow I found the front entrance, but there was a gate, and you needed a code to get in, and no one was around. I wasn't sure what to do. I tried ringing them on three numbers I had but there was no answer.

I think then I went back to the other place Google had directed me to, and a couple who were outside their house asked if they could help. I explained that I didn't know the code to get into the RV park, and they said they used to know one or two codes and gave them to me. It didn't look like a great area, but they were friendly. I went back to the main entrance, but it seems they had put in a new system recently at the RV park, so their advice didn’t help. I tried ringing a Walmart not far away to see if I could park in their parking lot overnight, as they often allowed this apparently, but nobody answered.

I had arranged to meet with a couple of musician friends living nearby from a Christian band called Zoetic the next day, and I rang one of them to see if I could park in their street. She was helpful and had a look for other RV parks that maybe would still be open. It seems that there were laws forbidding parking RVs on the street in their area so that wasn't going to work. I couldn't reach the other RV parks. So I just parked outside the gate and waited for morning.

I ate dinner cold from a tin, as I didn't want to be seen doing much outside while I was outside the park. Then I went to bed with my clothes on in case I was roused in the middle of the night. I didn't sleep much, if at all, in between the noisy road and wondering if police would come along and ask me what I was doing. I made good use of one of the containers I'd bought that you could go to the toilet in, since there were no facilities. It was stinking hot and humid, and there was no air conditioning in the van when the engine wasn't running, so that didn't help!

I kept dripping all the time whenever I was trying to find things in the van, which was often at the start. I had bought a little USB fan, and that was very handy to make things a bit nicer while being in the van at night. It was something like 36 during the day and completely overcast, and pretty warm at night too. Apparently this was really unusual weather for Arizona, which had been getting to 45 or so, and sunny. There was a cyclone of some sort hitting Southern California (I was glad I missed it, thank the Lord) that was affecting the weather in Phoenix.

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