Lake Havasu to show low, az to Albuquerque, NM

After spending the night in Lake Havasu, we began the trip on Interstate 40 to the town of Show Low, which is in Northern Arizona. The story goes that the town was named back in the 1870s and as they were attempting to name the town, one person said, “If you can show low, you win” The other turned up a deuce of clubs and replied, “Show Low it is” The main street is named Deuce of Clubs and a unique town name has held to this day.

We had originally planned on spending two nights and looking at some property in the area, the problem began when the drive took much longer than anticipated and we didn’t arrive until after 4:00 p.m. on the day before Easter. With everything being closed on Easter and us scheduled to leave on Monday morning property hunting didn’t look very promising. The flip side of that was we had previewed the property available, and nothing really appealed to us either in Show Low or in the neighboring community of Pine Top.

We stayed at the Elks Lodge in Show Low and this is seriously the nicest Elks Lodge we have ever seen, as well as one of the nicest RV parks we have ever stayed at. It is full of pine trees and not just a parking lot. This is a good thing, because when we hooked up the trailer to water, it poured inside the trailer by my side of the bed, which is where the freshwater tank is. The leak seemed to be coming from both the freshwater tank and the city water tank. At this point, we put towels down to absorb the water, turned all water off and looked for a mobile RV repair. Of course, it’s now 5:00 on Saturday before Easter, so we had to wait until Monday. We decided to stay an extra day and cut our stay in Albuquerque from 2 days to 1.

With no water coming into the trailer (other than through the wall!) we filled a large bucket with fresh water and placed it in the shower. Now we can use the toilet and flush it with extra water from the bucket. We filled empty water bottles with water from the outside supply and used them for hand washing. Dish washing was a little more of a challenge, but I heated water on the stove, mixed it with cold from our bucket and it worked well.

We had Easter dinner on paper plates, but it was Easter all the same! The family gathered at Chad and Brigette’s so we Face Timed with them for a bit Sunday afternoon. It was a different Easter, but fun all the same. We took a drive around Show Low and the neighboring communities and it is a lovely place. Home prices have recently sky-rocketed and many of the homes being built have HOAs which we are not interested in.

At 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning I called the mobile RV repair facility, but they were not sure they could fit us in. They gave me the name of another mobile RV repair, T & T Mobile RV Service. Teri was great and her husband Todd came out about 2:00. He found not only did we have a loose water connection, but our water pump was not working properly. While testing the city water connection I did not realize that the bathroom faucet was on, not really a problem, but the plug was in the drain! We had water running the length of the trailer and eventually had to move the theatre seating away from the wall to mop up all the water. Todd finished fixing our original issue and left, so we went to the Elks Lodge and had a drink and some popcorn.

We slept well, packed up and left Show Low around 8:30 on Tuesday morning and headed to Albuquerque. About 50 miles down the road a truck came by, honked and told us something was dragging – Really? Turned out our tongue jack that raises and lowers the trailer so we can hook and unhook it from the truck had broken and was dragging on the ground. We pulled over, Tom was assessing the situation when a Police Officer pulled up, he was actually the Police Chief of Holbrook, Arizona. They decided to tie it up off the ground with parachute cord and it should hold for the few miles we needed to go to get to a truck stop.

Once at the truck stop, we re-fueled and I called Coach Net, who we had just purchased RV roadside assistance from before we left home. They were extremely helpful, but Tom decided that rather than wait for roadside assistance he would just remove the jack and we’d try and get a new one in Albuquerque. Since we were only spending one night in Albuquerque, we would not need to unhook the truck from trailer if we couldn’t get a replacement.

The road to Albuquerque was extremely windy with gusts to 40 mph. Since the big rigs were still traveling, so did we! We bought a new tongue jack at Harbor Freight and Tom installed it at the campground.

Wow! What a few days. We’re heading to Amarillo, Texas tomorrow morning and then on to Denison to visit Debi and Terry Humphries for a few days. Let’s hope it’s smoother next few days, as they say in the movie Silverado “It’s a bad start boys”. The good news is, the sunset in Albuquerque this evening was stunning