Thursday September 28th 2017

Things are back to normal today. I got up at the normal time and I didn’t get engrossed in a book. The temperature has returned to seasonal averages. The high today was in the low 80s. It will be back in the 90s by the weekend. I didn’t do much blog worthy, but what follows is a synopses of some of the day.

Breakfast was a leisurely affair. I spent a good two hours drinking my coffee with a couple of English muffins while reading news and blogs on the Internet. This was followed by a few chores such as washing the dirty dishes in the sink before I was ready to leave camp for adventure. The only problem was I didn’t have any planned adventure.

I ended up checking out my departure route for Sunday. I will be relocating sixty to seventy miles south toward Phoenix. Most of the trip will be on Interstate 17, but that’s not an easy thing. As soon as I get on the highway the road starts up to the top of a mesa. It’s a good nine miles of maximum interstate grade to the top. The US Interstate highway system “never” exceeds a six percent grade. Let’s just say it’s enough that the trucks were down below fifty by the top of the climb. It was also an uninteresting trip. I turned around after about thirty miles.

On the way back I stopped at Walmart to stock up on groceries for the weekend. I don’t think this is the best run Walmart in the country. I’ve been there three times. Two out of three times the only available carts were in the parking lot. Today I brought one in from the parking lot and found there were some available by the door. The shelves are very poorly stocked. Each of the three times some of the items I wanted were not on the shelves. The price labels were there so I knew it was supposed to be available, but it was never on the shelves. My guess is that they haven’t stocked those areas in the week and a half I’ve been here. Today clerks weren’t stocking shelves but rather dragging product from the back of the shelves and lining it up along the front edge. At least I didn’t have to spend 20 minutes in the checkout line like last week.

One of the State Park’s man made ponds. One of the Verde River Days events will be open fishing for freshly stocked fish.

Here at the campground the park is filling up for the weekend. There is a special Verde River Days celebration in the park on Saturday. It looks like the campground will be full. I can’t decide if this event is a good thing for me or something to run away from.   I’ll probably check it out Saturday.