If you can tolerate a weird new ache or pain on a near-daily basis among other strange physical phenomena, growing older might just be the thing for you! Not only that, but with age come some actual benefits, like being able to take advantage of 55+ RV parks. Thus, we find ourselves at San Pedro RV Resort a 55+ community that offers an indoor heated pool, hot tub, laundry rooms, kitchens, trails, sport courts, activity programs, and it is <10 mins from groceries. There is cable TV, and park-wide free WiFi is coming in the next week. It's not fancy, as we've come to think of resorts, but it has decent monthly rates and is centrally located in an area we had wanted to explore a bit more.
I wasted no time in checking the activity calendar to find out when no one would be in one of the clubhouses, and I have twice enjoyed having the whole thing to myself to do laundry, try out some Paleo bread recipes I've been saving, and generally having a ball pouring over the endless stacks of old cookbooks and food magazines. For those of you who aren't 55+, cookbooks and food magazines are old-timey ways people had of recording and sharing information about how to make food for yourself, another seemingly bygone activity. There were books and magazines about other topics, too, I just happen to be partial to the food ones.
The pool pictured above is, obviously, the outdoor one which isn't quite open yet, but we've visited the indoor pool on several occasions. A few times I've gone by myself (don't worry, I use a kickboard for safety) and had the whole pool area all to myself. That pool is almost as warm as the hot tub, and it's deeeee-lightful. The hummingbird shown above took her sweet time finding us, although we saw several around the park right away. A permanent mobile home on one of the park's outer corners has quite the bird area set up with a row of hummy feeders and many little visitors. In our first week, I considered walking by carrying my feeder to try a sort of Pied Piper maneuver to lead them back with me.
Another early order of business was to get ourselves out to Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area, a place that is well-known in the birding world for its insane concentration of wintering Sandhill Cranes. You may remember these from Wisconsin last summer:
The family we watched there probably didn't come here for the winter what with it being 400 miles further than their southeast wintering grounds, but they certainly could have. I tried to spot them while we were there.
What you do see, of course, are tens of thousands of them taking flight at sunrise to stretch their wings, warm up, and find some breakfast. In order to witness this, we had to get up well before first light (TBG woke me up by playing a recording of the Sandhill call <3 ) and make the hour+ drive, then step out into the below-freezing temps to walk to the wetland edges for the full experience. Their distinctive calls could be heard individually and collectively as a near-deafening roar when more and more took to the skies. (The white flotilla of birds visible in the middle of the crowd are Snow Geese.)
There were several other birds out and about in the trees and many smaller ponds, but it was too uncomfortably cold to spend much time being still for very long to observe them. Back at the car we thawed and headed for our next stop in Douglas to check out another famous destination, the Gadsden Hotel.
We started in their coffee shop to restock our caffeine stores, and at first we thought you had to be a hotel guest to see the rest of the first floor, but as you can see that wasn't true. It was so beautiful, and it is everything I love about SW style. When you see what our new house is going to look like, you will be mystified by how little it resembles anything like this. I mean, not that I was ever going to have a sweeping marble staircase or massive pillars or even more than one level, but still. It made me wish we were staying there, eating in the sparkling dining room and spending an evening in the tavern. As it was, TBG set up his tripod for some of these photos, drawing the attention of the owners with whom we chatted pleasantly and who were interested in possibly using some of TBG's pics for their advertising.
Our last stop for the day was a return to the whimsical town of Bisbee with one mission in mind: To re-visit Pussycat Gelato and see if the Mexican Chocolate was as good as I remembered. Because we started our day so early, we had some time to kill before they opened, and of course we spent it walking around town a bit. The thing I disliked the most the first time was also still true, and that was all.the.cars. Any charm the town has -- and it has a lot of it -- is almost completely obliterated by cars both parked everywhere and constantly zipping through.
Finally, though, our destination opened up. The first photo shows TBG in 2019 with his Java Crunch, which he ordered again this time. When I ordered mine, the server said, "You know there's cayenne and cinnamon in it, right?" I said, "There better be!" OHSOGOOD! When I looked up the website after returning home, I saw that we'd totally missed the chance to visit their two newer locations in both Sedona and Scottsdale. At least I was smart and ordered a pint so I would have plenty of leftovers for another day's treat.
On one of those other days, we headed to nearby Kartchner Caverns State Park to find a hike we hadn't done on our first visit pre-fulltime. We picked the Guindani Trail.
As you can see, there are signs indicating it's a wildlife viewing area and a picnic table (in the full sun) for doing that. The retention pond was, indeed, rife with all manner of duck-types, but nothing I hadn't seen before, and nothing captivating enough to mitigate the constant barking from the city animal shelter just to the left of this area.
Disappointed by that, we headed out of town the other direction to check out a second e-bird hotspot, the Holy Trinity Monastery in the almost non-existent town of St. David.
The grounds are open to the public, and there is a dedicated 1.3 mile bird-watching path winding around the many buildings and ponds. There is even a nice little RV park on site! We did see many little birds, but it was the wrong time of day for any great sightings. Workers were dredging out the signature pond, but a nice lady clued us in that each evening, all the peafowl come to roost in the tree at the pond overnight. She said it was a lovely thing to watch, and we may return some evening to do so. TBG has plans to go back very early on a particular upcoming morning for a particular photo. I won't spoil it further than that.
I popped into the gift shop -- mostly religious items as you'd expect -- but I came away with a treat for TBG who has green tea every morning. That deep peacock blue? That's my favorite color in the world, and as trite as it may be to comment on the beauty of peacocks, their loveliness bowls me over every time. As with the SW style, we will have no peacocks roaming the grounds of our new place, I'm sorry to say.
For our next big hike, we headed into the Dragoon Mountains and down a long, bumpy road to the trail head for Slavin Gulch. The skies looked mostly stormy, but the weather report assured us it was all show and no blow.
The first part of the trail was a nice, smooth beginning as it led into the more lush gulch area.
We only encountered one other group of three women coming back, and they asked us if we were going all the way up to the mine. I had no idea that there even was a mine nor how far it was, but TBG said we probably were. The other hikers hadn't, having paused for a bite to eat and finding the wind a bit too shivery for their liking. We pressed on.
We heard more birds than we saw, and the only ones I could identify on the wing were Bridled Titmice. The flora was much more rewarding than the fauna. Mid-January through February is what is colloquially known as a "quiet time" in birding around here.
Approaching the ruins the Abril Mine, we passed a flattened cabin, the roof of which we could look down on from further up in the climb.
We had our snack break at the ruins, but those other hikers were right about that chilly, chilly wind, and we didn't tarry long. The return was uneventful save for a few thorny scritches for both of us and three deer I thought were people that startled me right when I was taking a privy break.
Speaking of freezing, the nights during these first few weeks have been at or below freezing, and I've had to pull the hummy feeder in most evenings. One morning, not 30 minutes after I put it back out, it was nearly frozen. My little visitor practically lands on my hand now when I hang her juice back out, so eager is she for her morning jolt. I have mine while I watch her, all puffy and fluffy, have hers.
On another day, we drove out to the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area for a trek and to see what birdies might be about. It's not the most beautiful time of year here, but the temps and blue skies help make up for the twiggy brownness.
We walked the Fairbank Loop, a nice, even trail off of which we took an uphill spur to the old cemetery, saw the remains of an defunct stamp mill, and finished along the river. There were lots of birds flitzing about the snags, most too far away or too fast to get a good look, never mind a good photo. The only one that posed for me was the above Say's Phoebe. There are more trails to be explored on another day, and I'd like to find not only that Towhee but a Green Kingfisher would be fun, too.
Our last big outing during the first two weeks here was out to the Coronado Nat'l Forest and the Cochise Stronghold, also in the Dragoons. It was another long drive in, but the road was better and led past some remote private residences to the beautiful campground area where we were greeted by several Mexican Jays obviously expecting a treat.
We headed out on the Cochise Trail, and we both thought very quickly it was to be our favorite thus far. Sometimes trails are foolers and lull you into thinking they're going to be great for their entirety, so we tend to reserve out loud praise in the beginning, but this time was no foolin'. We liked it the whole way.
We were even treated to a C-130 doing some canyon sortie training a couple of times. TBG served at Fort Huachuca as an Aerial Sensor Specialist, and he remembers well flying these canyons for training. As we've hiked, he's been able to recognize on the ground places they used as visual aids from the air, and he's really enjoyed connecting the dots that way.
On The House
So how did we find the property we bought anyhow? As I said prior, our could-not-recommend-anyone-better realtor Jill, who sold our original home, was keeping a casual eye on properties in the Sequim area, sending us listings as they became available. TBG and I differed on what we were looking for, he more amenable to buying and building, me not so much. Having gone through a large remodel on our old house and loving the result but loathing the process, I was not hot to go through that on an even grander scale. However, I was also not loving any built houses we were seeing, so we started looking more seriously at land, originally thinking we could buy something if the right piece presented itself, but still travel full-time and not be in any hurry to occupy it.
The biggest difference between what we'd (re)built before and now is, of course, the RV. Living in a house as it's being worked on is a special kind of hell, but with the RV, we can avoid that. That helped sway me to the Buy & Build idea. We loved the piece we eventually got the first time we saw it online because it checked all the boxes. It is near town but not in town, it is flat and already cleared, it sits on a dead-end street (mostly, there is an easement on the south side to access one residence; the main street is not a through-street,) there is no other unfinished property around it (i.e. no other builds,) and all the utilities are already in. If you've ever gone through this process, you know that last one is major, and we weren't willing to consider a piece without established utilities. An initial snag was that we didn't get it the first time we bid on it, it sold and came off the market, and we went back to the drawing board quite deflated. We kept seeing it on the realty sites, though, and TBG had our realtor re-check on what was happening. I don't fully understand what was going on, but there apparently wasn't a done deal on the books, and Jill was able to masterfully work with the other realtor to secure the property for us.
Making such a big commitment remotely and buying sight-unseen was, to say the least, a bit unnerving. We did consider having one of us go up to put boots on the ground, but through the very good fortune of both friends and strangers, we didn't feel the need to do that. Even before we put in the first bid, a retired realtor colleague of Jill's, who just so happened to also be building in the area, jumped in the car with her husband, drove over to scope out the neighborhood, and sent us several short, narrated videos. Having been a realtor, Nancy knew exactly what to look for both on the property and in the area. What a Godsend people like them are! We are eager to meet them in person and return their favor however we can (they are horse people, so perhaps some reciprocal stall-mucking is in our future?)
The next in-person visitors were our long-time friends, Erik & Theresa, who you all have "met" twice now on this blog, once at Sunset Crater and more recently in the Tetons. They have a family cabin on nearby Hood Canal, and they also drove over one day to assess the lay of the land and send us more short, narrated video clips. Another friend, Norm, who not only spent some time living the fulltime RV life, but also settled in nearby in Port Angeles, took a drive over to offer even more perspective giving it another big thumbs-up. All of these kind and generous folks were able to evaluate the condition of neighboring houses/property, traffic, noise levels, etc. and give us a very good virtual feel for the area. It helps that we're from Washington, too, and have spent some time in the general area. Nothing can determine long-term or more permanent conditions, of course, but their reconnaissance was as good or better than we could've done ourselves. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone -- party at our place when it's all done!
One of the last obstacles to clear and confirm our decision to buy and say so-long to our earnest money was the well test. The well had been in place and unused for several years, and it needed an official quality test. Jill was onsite the day the tester came out, and she was able to confirm that there was no strong sulfur (or any other funky) smell, which wouldn't have been a deal-crusher but was good to know in advance. Then we waited on tenterhooks for the results, which clearly came back excellent.
For a little icing on the cake, all of the visiting to our property happened during what was one of the wettest winters on record in the area, and every report concluded that our piece was staying quite dry. Onward to our adventures securing a builder and playing with graph paper in the next post!
**********COMMENTS**********
Wow! Those sandhills! They are familiar year-round residents in Florida, but I’ve never seen more than a small family group together. That massive group is such a powerful sensory experience. I’d definitely get up early and brave the frigid conditions to see that huge flock getting prepared for the day. The promise of a lovely historic hotel AND ice cream would also help incentivize me.
You know how lucky you are to have good friends and realtors to help in your property purchase. Buying sight unseen must be nervewracking but you had the best possible substitute for visiting in person. And obviously it has all worked out perfectly so far. I can’t wait to see the plans take shape!
It was such a fun comparison to having watched the little family in Wisconsin to seeing this massive display. I choose to romantically believe that “our” cranes went the extra distance and are among them here. It was so cold that I wondered at first if they needed to wait for the water to thaw before they could fly out of it like those South American flamingos. You would also really like that hotel, and no one could NOT like that gelato.
We do know we are lucky for all the help we’ve gotten so far in securing our property. I think TBG was more hesitant to buy w/o seeing it in person; I sort of liked that it kind of took some of the usual hesitations away. Well, it’s done now LOL! Stay tuned…
I have often said that the 55 and over resorts are missing out when they refuse us entry. We would be their ideal guests!! Good for you guys, though, that you can take advantage. It looks like a perfect winter spot and I remember some of those nearby attractions from our visit – lots to see and do. I am bummed we missed that gelato place though. Any ice cream with Cayenne – actually, anything with cayenne – makes me happy. The Gadsden is gorgeous and TBG’s photos are terrific. That would be so cool if the hotel used them for advertising!
You definitely lucked out having good and reliable folks to help you out with your purchase, and by all accounts, it seems you got a great place! And I totally agree – having the RV while the build is going on will make all the difference in the world. Sometimes these things just come together perfectly. Can’t wait to watch it all unfold!
I think the 55+ places should also include child-free people of any age. I also wish that grandkids, as oh-so-adorable as they can be, were not allowed in the pool or the hot tub or really in the park at all because I’m a mean old lady. But, seriously, doesn’t that kind of defeat the 55+ purpose? Anyhow…
I’m sorry I didn’t know that gelato place had other stores in Scottsdale and Sedona, both places we were this year, dagnabbit!! I would like to sit in the lobby of the Gadsden and enjoy some Mexican Chocolate Gelato. Join me?
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that things continue to go as (mostly) smoothly as they have been. eeeeek
Nice report and info on your future home development ! Congratulations
Sent from my iPad
Thank you x2!
Several years ago, we boondocked at Whitewater Draw. Spending 3 days living amongst the sandhills remains a highlight of our years of full-time RVing. Fortunately, I had my winter gear with me to endure those cold temps. I’m excited for you and the new home build.
If not for the deep-freeze, it looked like a really great place to boondock a few nights. Oh, some days I’m not so sure about settling in the north again, even with the temperate PNW climate. I can already feel that chill in my bones. I hope, though, that you might be able to come up for a visit at some point (when you won’t need the winter gear!)
Now you’re making me long for the Southwest! You’ve added some cool items to our list…the Cochise Trail, gelato in Bisbee, and the Gadsden Hotel. And you’re making me want to return to Whitewater Draw. I will never forget that magical experience…thanks for taking me back with your beautiful photos and video. Love the way TBG woke you up for your adventure.
It’s so awesome that you were able to buy your land long-distance. It’s very beautiful, and maybe you can have a little chat with those trees and ask them to grow slowly so that you don’t lose your view. But trees are much better than what our annoying ‘new’ neighbors did in Ashland, building a stupid two-story garage and taking away our view of the mountains from the backyard. You won’t have that problem with your big piece of property!
My friend, I think you are a lovely, hopeless wanderluster. The good news is that all of the new things I’ve added to your list are between Appalach and Sequim!
It was so cute how TBG woke me up to go see the cranes. I don’t know how long he planned that, but he was so excited to execute his little plan
I’m glad we got video to take you back with us.
As much as modern technology is a PITA, it’s been so great in the house buying process. I think those trees already block the mountains pretty effectively from our vantage, but pretty trees are a nice view, too. Not so much a garage — WTH?! You have a much better view where you landed than that, fortunately, and no one can build in that, either!
You’re the third blog post that I’ve read lately that has visited the Gadsden Hotel. Did either of you happen to notice the chip out of the marble stairs? John saw it during our visit and did some reading. It seems that Pancho Villa tried to ride his horse up the stairs and the horse caused the chip in the step. Just a little trivia. You’ve done some fun hikes in great area. A stop in Bisbee is always fun. We visited two different winters and had a great time trying out all the neat restaurants and climbing the 1000 steps. So many quirky items in people’s yards. So happy for you that your property purchase workout from afar. How great to have so many people visit it to send video for you to view. Hope the house building goes as smoothly.
I had heard the legend of Pancho Villa chipping the stairs, but I didn’t look for it while there. I wonder if he made it all the way up or stopped when he damaged the stair. I’m guessing he’d been drinking?
We did the Bisbee 1000 (+400) our first time through — it was a fun way to see the town and get a hike at the same time.
We’re hoping the house build will go smoothly, but experience tells us it will be a series of fits and starts, probably moreso with the supply chain issues and shortages. Keep your fingers crossed!!
I would love to go back to Whitewater Draw, those Sandhill cranes coming back to roost is just amazing to watch and hear!