Travel Day to Cottonwood, AZ

We left the Riverside RV Park in Laughlin, NV at 8:30 AM. The first 12 -15 miles out of Laughlin toward Kingman, AZ are brutal. It's all uphill - steep uphill - and the truck was struggling to maintain 45 - 50 MPH. My fuel economy estimator was showing 2.9 MPG when we arrived in Kingman and finally reached I-40. The entire stretch on I-40, which amounted to 145 miles, was more hilly terrain and the fuel economy meter when we hit Flagstaff was still in the low 6 range. Thank goodness for the downhill segment between Flagstaff and Camp Verde where we exited and finished the trip with a 7.5 MPG average. Still terrible fuel economy, but not bad considering the way we started out.

By not stopping at all along the way, we made the entire trip in less than 4.5 hours and arrived shortly after 12:30 PM. Following the check-in at Thousand Trails and our setup, we took these shots of our site and the campground:

Our space is located right behind the swimming pool and it may be a destination sometime during our stay.

We drove into Cottonwood to check out any changes that may have occurred since our last visit here several years ago. It looked pretty much the same as we could remember. I got a haircut while in town at Fantastic Sams and we each had a Blizzard at the DQ before leaving town.

Our evening was spent at the Cliff Castle Casino where we also have not visited in several years. There were many changes in the slot machines as we expected, but we did fairly well in the short time we played last night. Josie left ahead for the night and I lost just a few dollars. That will be worth another visit or two before we leave.

I extracted the copy of a news article that appeared on Patty's Facebook page about Austin's accomplishments on the football field. As I mentioned sometime during the week, he is the Chicago area's leading rusher and his school's leading career rusher as stated in this article - and there are still a couple games remaining! What an amazing season and we are hoping it all leads to tough choices between colleges that want to recruit him. There are several that are courting him now and it will be interesting to see how the season ends for him. We are very proud of him, and he is a very good student to boot!...