Sistah Pat

We are so far behind it ain’t even funny!  We left the RV park on Friday at 11:00 and moved over to Walmart to wait for DH to get his dental work finished.  I could not believe it when he called at 6:00 p.m. Friday evening and said they were going to have to remake his bridge.  In the process of adjusting the bite, the dentist drilled all the way through the surface of the crown.  Having worked in the dental field 15 years prior to becoming a teacher, I know that this happens fairly often.  I also know that it means a wait of another four or five days to have the lab remake the bridge.  I have to give them credit, the lab technician came to the dental office Friday evening and took new impressions and said he would work on Saturday to remake it.  The dental office also opened on Saturday to cement it.  Still, it meant another day of boondocking in Walmart’s parking lot.  He finally got finished about 6:00 p.m. Saturday evening and we hit the road. 

Drove for about 5 or 6 hours and pulled over in Tucson around midnight for another night of boondocking.  This morning we got up and spent about three hours in Saguaro National Park.  That was one of the things Andrew really wanted to see and he loved it.  From Tucson, we headed North toward Petrified Forest.  It was supposed to be a 5 hour drive but I don’t think Mapquest is talking about a behemoth like Manny pulling a car through the White Mountains and Globe, Arizona.  The drive alternated between Manny crawling up the mountains at 25 m.p.h and hurtling down the other side at speeds that made me so nervous I had to go back in the bedroom and read a book.  I was freaking out!  Hairpin curves and 8% slopes that went on and on and all these cliffs and dropoffs just a few feet from the edge of the road.  I kept telling DS to slow down and he kept telling me he couldn’t ride the brakes because they’d overheat.  I remember some pretty scary roads up around Escalante and Mount Zion but I forgot about the ones around this area.  Anyway, we made it to the Petrified Forest area around 7:00 p.m. and the park closes at 6:00 so we pulled over for the night in a KOA campground.  The plan is to rip through Petrified Forest early tomorrow morning, run down the road to Meteor Crater and then shave a day off the Grand Canyon.  That way we’ll make up at least one day of the two we’re behind.