Living the Dream...: Monday, February 27, 2012 (Travel to Lake Pleasant, Peoria, AZ)

It was 10:00 a.m. when we pulled out of Catalina State Park...it was a beautiful sunny morning...but quite breezy out. There was a wind warning that included a blowing dust warning...they weren’t kidding! Once reaching Interstate 10, we headed northwest towards Phoenix...I took these pictures of the dust storm as we drove along the freeway.

This is just as we are about to turn onto the Interstate...

Blowing dust across the freeway...

...and we're in the middle of it...

...and more dust...

We passed this...part of a carnival ride...too funny...

Steve just loves being back in the traffic of the Phoenix highways...

Our destination today is Lake Pleasant Regional Park just northwest of Phoenix...we arrived at the entrance gate shortly after 1:00. I had made a reservation on-line...what I didn’t know was that there was an additional charge for the boat...$4/day; another $28....sheesh...and it didn’t matter if we weren’t planning on using the boat everyday (which we weren’t). That was the start to a very frustrating afternoon!

We were given directions to site 154...what we didn’t know when making the reservations on-line that it was basically a double-site with just a row of rocks separating it from site 152, next door. The two sites had picnic tables at the end of the sites...now, as if that wasn’t bad enough (should we get neighbours in 152), the description on-line of our site said that it was 28 feet wide. There is absolutely no way it was that wide...we are 14 feet wide with our sliders out and we would have almost over-hung the next site...this just isn’t going to work for us. After trying unsuccessfully to call the entrance gate, we decided to drive back down and see if there were other sites available.

The elderly volunteer at the gate, gave us a few sites that were available for the week that we wanted to stay...but...to make a long story short...any of the sites available were not wide enough for us to get our sliders out. The sites are plenty wide enough but they have built casitas over the picnic tables that end up overhanging onto the site pad...there would have been plenty of room had they just moved them over a few feet. Dale, a camp host there said that the campground was built over 17 years ago...I guess sliders weren’t an issue back then. We spent well over 2 hours talking and waiting for return calls from the front gate...and then the manager. We finally managed to get our money refunded minus the $8 reservation fee (or at least she said that she would be refunding it back to our charge card...I’ll have watch for it).

Picture of the windy lake...

By now, it was after 3:30...where do we go now? Steve is not happy with the clear coat paint on the driver’s side of the truck...it has a “dull orange peel” look so he had contacted Lucky to take it back to have it buffed up. Consequently, we needed to stay somewhere in this area. We had tossed around the idea of going back to Usery Mountain Regional Park or McDowell Mountain Regional Park but they are both on the east side of Phoenix...quite a distance away.

The woman at the park office said that there was a private RV park not far away...so I called Pleasant Harbour RV Resort. They have a site available...so we booked it and after getting directions, I said we’ll be there shortly.

Fancy entrance...

The site available ended up being in the “temporary” area which is basically the overflow area but it has power and water hook-ups...and a great view of the lake and marina (that is, until someone pulls in beside us).

We got set up...here is Steve battling the wind as he set up the satellite dish...we actually ended up moving the truck over a bit to block the wind...