Life on the Road

Last Fall, we had planned to go to Arizona to meet up with my dad and stepmom during their vacation, and visit Sedona and the Grand Canyon. We’d been to Sedona  in 1999 for our 1-year wedding anniversary, and were looking forward to a return visit.

I made reservations very early for September, but failed (in my way) to record them in any meaningful way. So the day after my reservation was supposed to start, I called the LoLo Mai Springs campground in a panic– we were about a week away from being able to get there, and they were very understanding and accommodating about changing the reservation to a date we would actually be able to make.

When we finally arrived at LoLo Mai, we were startled by what a long and windy and out-of-the-way path our directions told us to take to get there, considering there was a straight shot from a wider, non-windy highway just a mile up the road. But we pulled in and checked in. During checkin, I was amused by the presence of many animals in the office. What I was not amused by was the clerk’s inability to do simple math on a calculator. By the time we were checked in, I just let her overcharge me by $2 because I didn’t want her to make yet another mistake and this time come up with a $90 overcharge like she’d done before.

We went to the campsite and quickly learned that the satellite dish was not going to work– too many trees (they were brushing the top of the RV!) We were right next to the bathroom building, and I immediately saw that our side yard was being used as the pathway. Not cool.

We asked at the office about alternative sites, and they said they had none. We said “but you have wifi, right?” remembering the ad. “Yes, but the signal up at your site is broken.”

Uh, okay. That was probably not going to work for us. I had already tried using my cell phone with no luck– the signal strength was 0 and had been for about 3 miles before reaching the campground.  No satellite, no internet, and no phone mean no working!

We said we would have to think seriously about this. After conferring, John went down to the office to have them refund all but the first night’s charge (since we would be staying for the night). On his way back, he was startled by a family of skunks. It turns out their fondness for animals is not limited to the dogs and rats in the office. They feed several families of skunks and raccoons in a “habitat.”

We had a bit of culture shock at that one. After my meltdown, we went out to dinner and I lost my credit card– it fell right out of my pocket. We returned to the campground to ask at the office if anyone had turned it in. We had to wait at the office for someone to come back, and in the course of talking with them about it (and the fact that I couldn’t call out on my cell phone), I said that we would use the pay phone, which was at least up at the bathroom building next to our RV.

“Oh, that phone’s gone. There’s no phone there.”

I was really glad I was talking to someone with keys to the office, because she was at least able to let me use the office phone to call my bank and put my card on hold until I could call back with the complete information to cancel it.  I can imagine a scenario where I went back to the RV and found the phone gone, and no way at all to call and cancel my credit card that night. What a pain!

Understand: if we had been “trying to get away from it all,” LoLo Mai would have been an oasis of escape. As it was, we were trying to live our normal daily lives, just in a different place. We weren’t on vacation or retirement, so the disconnectedness of the park made it really unsuitable to our needs. They were also above-and-beyond understanding about our rapidly-changing travel plans, and did a great job of making it painless to escape their escape!

In the morning, we went scouting for a new campground and found an oversized parking lot across the highway from an Indian casino, called Distant Drums RV Resort. It had a pool and hot tub. It had wifi at the sites, but there were no trees to speak of, so satellite reception was exceptional.

It had some of the most beautiful desert sunsets I’ve ever seen. We would go out for a walk and just stand on the edge of the park, staring as the sky shifted through hues of gold and yellow and purple. It was sparse and surprisingly simple, given that it had the appearance of yet another overgrown parking lot.

It’s possible that Distant Drums is where I learned to love the desert. Certainly, it’s where I learned to love parking lot-style RV parks, where the park gives you the space to do what you need to do, the room to spread out just a little bit, while still enjoying your lifestyle.

Travel Details:

LoLoMai Campground
PO Box 3169, West Sedona, AZ
(928)634-4700
Distant Drums RV Resort
583 W. Middle Verde Rd., Camp Verde, AZ
(877) 577-5507

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