Escapade and Amado

De Anza RV Resort

After leaving BLM land north of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, we spent a couple days at De Anza RV Resort in Amado, AZ. Once again, we hooked up with Jim and Corinne and had the wonderful opportunity to meet Corinne’s dad, also named Jim. We even got to have dinner at his place one night.

Amy caught up with laundry and got some much needed shopping done at Joann Fabrics. Once Amy and Corinne were done with their fabric shopping, Dan picked up Amy for some shopping of their own. Dan discovered that the local Best Buy just got a new shipment of Mavic 2 Pro drones so he took the opportunity to stop by and pick one up. When opportunity presents itself, we hope to share more interesting photos and maybe some video of the places we stay and visit. In the meantime, we’ve included a couple shots from Dan’s initial test flights.

Escapade RV Rally

We spent the most part of the week attending the 59th annual Escapade, an educational/social rally put on by the Escapees RV club. There were seminars every morning and afternoon and live entertainment most nights. The entertainment for Tuesday night was Redhead Express, a country band of four sisters from Alaska. They were accompanied by their 2 brothers (ages 17 & 18) and a third male musician. When the ladies needed to take a break, the three men took the stage and provided enough change of pace to make for a very enjoyable evening.

The seminars ranged in topic from RV safety and maintenance to how to get internet while on the road to where are some interesting places to go and things to see. All in all, it was a good experience even if it did bring back memories of school as the seminar sessions ended and you hustled to the next session. We met new friends and visited with those we had made at Quartzsite and the Winter Blast in Lake Havasu City. It’s nice to know that we’ll find familiar faces when we attend an Escapees event.

One highlight of the week was getting our rig weighed. This is something that is highly recommended and will often surprise people with numbers that show they are exceeding specs in one or more area. We thought we would be fine but knew it was a good idea to get it done. We are pleased to announce that all our numbers came in under their maximum allowed and, from what we were told, we are in the extreme minority. We were told that a couple folks were so bad that they were told to see the RV mechanics to try to redistribute weight and then come and get re-weighed.

We weighed our rig with a full tank of fresh water. This is what is recommended, especially if you do a lot of boondocking and need to travel with full fresh tanks. Our fresh water tank, when full, weighs 930 lbs. With that included, our rig weighed in at 20,825 lbs and it has a GVWR (max allowed weight) of 21,000 so we were under by a whopping 175 lbs. It’s also worth noting that we had recently restocked on several items, including a case of wine, so we have a little head room but not much. The other critical numbers had significantly more headroom than the actual trailer weight. For the record, the truck without the trailer but including everything we normally have in it (including us) when traveling weighed 9,250 lbs.