Didn’t take long to get settled in at John’s place here in Tucson, learn the traffic, shopping, fun stuff, and what good restaurants are near. I did have trouble finding the driveway from the heavily traffic’ed main road as I’d be traveling 50 MPH usually surrounded by vehicles on this 4 lane highway and have to find the drive way partially hidden by a curve and bushes. Coming from the other direction there’s a large building just near the turn so that way wasn’t as difficult. But that’s the really nasty unmaintained private road section so really don’t like taking that road at night.
But eventually, settled in and got used to the place so finding the right turnoff became a breeze. It is still tricky finding it at night because it’s a semi-rural area and there are zero street lights nearby. And the houses are set well back from the main highway, and from the private drives.
Here are a few pictures of my RV all set up and connected to the new shore power. Note I’m parked right next to an AT&T cell phone tower station. Doesn’t seem to interfere with my Verizon signal though.
The day before I moved here, I borrowed John’s loppers and spent a couple hours slowly driving along the approach road (in my car) cutting back all the overgrown desert plants that over hung the road and tossing big sharp rocks out of the roadbed. Did a fairly good job, only had one of my RV’s front rear view mirrors scratched when I drove though the next day.
Here’s the AT&T building. I’m kinda crowded next to it. I can’t fully deploy my awning where it is just now but I could if I backed the RV up 2 feet. That metal awning on the building sort of blocks deployment. It’s handy right there because it allows me to place my kitty litter box right under it and storms seem to leave that area dry.
And below you can see I added some informational labels to the power box. What’s funny is that you can see that someone wrote ‘Murray’ on the lower right corner in this box with a marking pen? There is a family named Murray that live right next door. Just a few yards from this power distribution box. But it turns out that the manufacturer of this electrical box is also named Murray…Electrical. Caused some confusion when John first moved in. He wasn’t sure this was his power box or the neighbors for a while. Or who was paying for the power usage. Turned out he was.
This is where we tapped into power for the new RV spot. Added a new 50 amp breaker and I cleaned up the wiring mess that was there under that cover. It’s outside so there was some corrosion going on. Bad enough that it caused John’s nearby garage’s ‘welder’ outlet to only have 80 Vac. Once I cleaned that corrosion off the contacts and trimmed the wires back where needed, plus replace a bad circuit breaker voltage went back up to 120 Vac.
So here is a shot of that trench. Just a few days after we buried it. Sure doesn’t take long for evidence of burial to disappear here in the desert. If I’d dug a trench like this up in the Walla Walla valley area, evidence would still be there years later.
Here’s a shot of just across John’s driveway towards the neighbors on the other side from the Murray’s place. My RV faces east and that is the direction this shot is taken. And easterly is where Tucson is, off in the distance and to the left.
And here’s the driveway I take when heading out shopping. It’s fairly steep. I’m going to have to negotiate that with the RV when I leave. Down at the ‘T’ I will take a right, trying to avoid all the big rocks on either side of the road and it’s not very wide there, than a few yards later it leaves the nice cement roadway and goes onto the unmaintained and unpaved section I’ll have to drive on to make it out of here. The road I came in on when I arrived. I’m not too nervous about it since I did all that brush trimming AND the fact that the RV has a high clearance and good brakes. Plus I made it in no problem. Should be okay. I can’t turn left because just near where that driveway joins the main highway, it’s far too steep for an RV. If I went that way, it would high center and get stuck. I’d have to call the tow trucks. Ajo highway runs laterally to the private drive there.
Few days after getting settled, John and I headed downtown to look around. I enjoy being a passenger occasionally and this trip I was the passenger. Oh, hey, there’s the street car.
Some very fine looking buildings here in downtown. From a distance, Tucson doesn’t look all that big, even with it’s over 1 million population. Mainly because it’s so spread out over this huge valley where it’s situated. Plus it doesn’t have all that many high rise buildings.
Pretty interesting facade this building has. Don’t think I’ve seen anything like it anywhere else.
We decided to take the street car for a free ride (Covid thing). Here’s the tiny park where we jumped aboard.
And after that short circuit of downtown Tucson on the street car (3.9 miles total with 23 stops), headed back to John’s place . It’s off in the distance and to the left from this perspective. This pyramid shaped hill is quite distinct and we have to navigate around it or this side of it to get there.
I’ve gotten comfortable over the weeks here with heading downtown for a walk about, beer, or even dinner on occasion. Really easy to navigate in a car. Not like a huge city like Portland where you might spend 30 minutes trying to find parking.
One of the nicer historical places the trolley passed. I didn’t get it’s name. Check out the green grass. Don’t see much green grass in Tucson.
So that’s it for today. There’ll be a few more pictures of downtown in future posts as it’s so easy to get to.
Upcoming articles will also cover some of the outlying areas of Tucson that I visited. John’s place is just outside the city limits and if I head west from his place, it’s all bedroom communities and several older manufactured home parks. Plus a smattering of BLM open land where dry camping is allowed where I’d see 10’s of RV’s all set up. Surprising so few of them have solar systems installed.
I was checking out housing prices over in that area a couple months ago and can track the sales prices on Zillow or similar and in 2020 the prices soared to outrageous levels. For example, a property with a manufactured home built in the ’60’s had been slowly climbing in value. Last year it mid-year was listed at $89,000. This year? $179,000. A jump of $90,000 and near 50% in one year. When it had been valued at less than $90K for the entire previous 10 years. Grrr.
And then in an upcoming article there will be a visit to an old mission. It’s been around since the 1700’s I think? I’ll have to check that.
Anyway, hope you enjoy my ramblings, thanks for reading!
Jim…