Trip to Virginia Day One

Phoenix AZ to Gallup NM

10/2/2021

Leaving Cave Creek Regional Park

We packed up to leave our staging site at Cave Creek Regional park and start heading east to Virginia to see family. Everything started out well until we tried to raise the trailer landing gear to hitch up to the truck and they wouldn’t move. The hydraulics didn’t want to work and when we tried to put our slide out that also use hydraulics they didn’t work either.

We spent about 45 minutes diagnosing the problem and determined that the 50 amp breaker from the batteries had popped. We got the landing gear to run enough to get hooked up by resetting the breaker. We will talk more on this issue in the upcoming posts and look for a video on diagnosing the problem and resetting the breaker.

After we got attached we proceeded to the dump station and emptied our waste tanks before starting on what was planned to be a 5 hour plus trip to Gallup NM. We hadn’t decided where we were going to overnight yet exactly but had some options.

I-17 to Flagstaff

The first main drive was up I-17 to Flagstaff where we would get the I-40 for the majority of our east bound drive. We hit slow traffic going up the mountains onto the high mesa’s before Prescott/Sedona. We pulled in at Prescott and had lunch at a Loves truck stop then continued on. We made it to Flagstaff without further incident and headed east on I-40.

I-40 to Gallup

Our original plan had been to stop near Winslow overnight and continue into Albuquerque the next day, but this weekend the Balloon festival was going on in Albuquerque and there were no sites at the parks. So we decided to do a big push and get through Albuquerque without stopping. This mean’t a 200 mile drive on I-40 to Gallup, we had chosen three overnight spots in Gallup, the first was a library just inside Arizona, The second was Walmart and the third was a casino just past Gallup. We were hoping for the Casino as that would put us further east but it was closed so we chose Walmart.

Doing this push meant that we couldn’t stop and see the petrified forest or Meteor Crater National Monument, so we’ve added these to our todo list the next time we are in AZ.

Walmart Overnighting

We decided to try and park at Cracker Barrel first but when we pulled in we knew the spots were to short for our rig and we moved on to Walmart down the street. We got there early around 6PM and managed to find a spot on the outer edge of the parking lot so that we could put our bed out. I put our landing gear down to take some pressure off the truck suspension and we put out bed slide out. We then fed Nell and left her in the trailer while we went to a nearby Applebee’s for dinner and then to Walmart to get some rope to be able to pull in our steps. We had to use the rope to get the steps into the trailer as we were worried a vehicle might hit them if they were down. We settled in for the night and was amazed at the number of semi’s that parked in the lot overnight.

Staying at Walmart was an experience and we determined that while yes we can do it, we both prefer knowing we have somewhere to stay for the night already reserved.