Cottonwood, Emergency, Cottonwood and No Time

First of all, we decided to go to Cottonwood yesterday instead of Payson since we wanted to try to talk to some of the campgrounds and other places that may be possibilities for us to work the winter and not be too far from Happy Jack for our return next summer. We stopped at two very good campgrounds - Distant Drums which is directly across the freeway from the Cliff Castle Casino (Josie likes the location - ha), and the Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood. Both places indicated that there may be a possibility for employment but could not promise anything. We stopped at the Verizon store and reactivated our Verizon account - yeah! - since the merger is now complete and we can get reception with a new roaming program. It works! Our next stop was at the Out of Africa park along route 260 between I-17 and Cottonwood. These people were ecstatic to talk to Josie since they have been craving a bi-lingual customer service person and had a sign at the admission counter stating that they were hiring a bi-lingual customer service person. They could hardly wait to get her application and arrange for a meeting with the owner, which was scheduled for today. This is an opportunity, right now at least, for Josie only but could work out for us in the short term.

Along with this activity in Cottonwood, I made reservations at both the Thousand Trails campground and Western Horizon campground, which are 5 miles apart on route 260 between I-17 and Cottonwood. We have reservations at those two campgrounds from October 21 (our projected last day at Happy Jack) until January 9th - at no cost to us since we are members of both. The deal is we can stay 21 days at Thousand Trails and go to Western Horizon Park for 14 Days, and repeat the process for an unlimited time. If one of the other two campgrounds can offer us a position to work a certain number of hours for our space and hookups, I could satisfy that requirement and we would cancel those reservations and not have to move. Moving back and forth every few weeks is really no problem though as that is the way we hope to travel in the future - a couple weeks here, a couple weeks there. Right now it is important that Josie work for both Social Security benefits and to pay for medical insurance.

We didn't finish in Cottonwood until late in the afternoon and we came home to have dinner and watch a little TV before bedtime. Josie was going through her (monthly?) exercise of dying her hair when suddenly I heard this scream from the bathroom. It sounded like she cut off an arm. She accidentally got a swatch of her hair dye in her eye and was screaming for help. We washed out the eye with water for about 30 minutes and also put in some eye lubricant - Refresh Tears - to try to calm her down. The burning stopped but she felt pain every time she moved her eye.

After a sleepless night, she said she needed to see a doctor this morning and I fully understood. The information on the dye container said that it could cause blindness if it got into the eye. Since it appears that we will be going to Cottonwood for the winter, we searched for doctors there, and found a good one at the Southwestern Eye Center in Cottonwood. I took the laptop with me and anticipated writing the blog this morning while she was being treated in the office. No way. She asked me to accompany her through the procedures and we were out of there in 45 minutes. Unbelievable for an emergency situation. We've never seen better service in any medical facility. Josie has a burn on her cornea that caused the pain and they put a contact lens in her eye to ease the pain by eliminating the friction from her eyelid on the cornea, along with some prescribed medication. We called Chi Chi and Jamie and switched shifts with them so we went right to work when we returned.

I will continue the saga tomorrow so that this entry doesn't get too long...