On Monday, December 15, we set out from our home in Tucson and headed north and west to Valley of Fire State Park, which is in Nevada, northeast of Las Vegas.
The drive was long — about 8.5 hours and 480 miles — but pretty much uneventful except for the refrigerator which quit working at some point on the way to Valley of Fire.
It wasn’t actually until Tuesday morning that we realized our refrigerator had definitely died (the control board failed and needed to be replaced). We were hoping that maybe the propane gas had just not been working during Monday’s drive. It’s a good thing it wasn’t the middle of Summer or all of our food would likely have spoiled.
I’d only ever heard bits and pieces about Valley of Fire State Park. I knew it was really pretty and had some nice hiking trails. That was about it other than that cell service could be spotty.
Cell service was almost non-existent. Every now and then a text message might pop up and I’d try to respond only to find that service had disappeared. Or, I’d have one little dot of LTE service and couldn’t even send a text. It was actually kind of nice, but did feel a bit weird to be disconnected for so long.
The campground was gorgeous. There are actually two campgrounds at the park, Atlatl Rock and Arch Rock. We stayed at the former and the latter was just around the corner.
Fred really enjoys long walks at state and national parks where we really are out in nature, as opposed to RV parks and resorts, which are typically like large parking lots where everyone is crammed together. I’ll show you the view from our site in a future post.
Limited cell service meant we had to drive around to find a cell signal so we could search online for the part we needed to fix the refrigerator.
We drove the hour and a half down to Las Vegas and the surrounding area looking for parts on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we drove back down to Las Vegas to visit Red Rock Canyon in the morning, went to the Hoover Dam after that, and then to Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb, to pick up the part we’d ordered the day before.
Mike fixed the refrigerator as soon as we got back to our campsite Wednesday evening. Thursday and Friday were spent touring areas in the state park.
I have lots more images to share. I’d hope to do some blogging while at Valley of Fire, but the lack of signal made that impossible. So I’ll be playing catch-up over the next week or so.
Right now, we are in Arizona at Lake Havasu State Park. We’re only here for a total of two nights. More on this stay later. It’s just about time to head to our favorite of the four local breweries for dinner.
We are all looking forward to getting back home to Tucson tomorrow (Monday).