October 13, 2006 Friday the 13th, oh no!! Thank goodness nothing bad happened to us today, although, it's Friday the 13th at 5 pm and the day isn't over yet, knock on wood that nothing happens. Let's see, the last blog ended on Wednesday morning and we were in Winslow, at Meteor Crater RV Park. After writing the blog I took Valley for a walk then came back to the coach and showered and got ready to leave. Dave, Valley, and I then walked to the office to find out if the visitor center had parking for RV's, which they did so we decided to stay hooked up and drive there, that way we could just hit the road when we were done. When we left the time was too close for a phone meeting that Dave had to be on so luckily no one was behind us when he just stopped on the road and I took over driving. Well needless to say, I can't drive the RV with those spring tennis shoes on, they add a few inches to your height, plus I'm not use to them yet, so when I started driving I kept stepping on the brake instead of the gas, I kept saying that this just doesn't feel right and Dave was yelling and I was yelling then Dave figured out I was stepping on the brake instead of the gas. I know, I know, it's hard to believe we didn't figure it out right away, but the damn thing goes on its own just like a car and I was barely touching the brake because I couldn't feel anything in those shoes. I kept thinking the damn emergency brake was left on in the tow car, by Dave, wrong, just couldn't feel the gas petal. It was pretty funny, but I guess you had to be there. Back to the viewing of the Meteor Crater, what an amazing thing to see, you don't realize the size of the hole until you get there. One thing they say about the crater size is "imagine 20 football games being played simultaneously on its floor, while more than 2 million spectators observe from its sloping sides." also "the crater is over 4,000 feet across and 2.4 miles in circumference." It's pretty damn big and like I said really amazing to see. I think the cost was a bit much, which we over heard some other people saying but oh well, what doesn't cost these days. After leaving we drove to Cottonwood, Arizona, we arrived about 11:30 and parked in Fry's grocery store and unhooked the car. We thought it better to drive around to the different RV Parks and check them out first before we just drove to one, like we have been doing, and not being to happy with the place. The RV parks in Cottonwood are shit in our opinion, so we ended up at "Dead Horse State Park" in Cottonwood which is really nice except it only has electric and water. They have a dump station when you first enter so Dave will have to drive there every 5 days or so and dump, that's one thing that is not my job, but I know someday I will have to learn. I can tell you one thing, I will put this off as long as possible, I'm afraid if it comes to the day I have to do it, my RVing is over. October 12, Thursday morning, Dave had phone conferences so I took Valley for a walk. The weather was really nice but we had heard rain was on the way. I'm beginning to believe that the rain is following us now, damn it. When Valley and I got back from walking I decided to go and do laundry, Dave was finishing up his phone calls and wanted us to wait for him. Once we started the laundry we drove over to Century 21 where Gail, the agent we use here, works, Gail is in Italy until the 14th but the girl in the office gave Dave some printouts of properties to look at that we might be interested in purchasing. After the laundry we drove over to get copies of our tax bills and see what we need to do to get them put in the ‘Trust Name” One of the houses is in the trust but the other one isn’t, don’t ask me why. Dave called the rental company that handles the houses for us and told them we wanted to do a walk thru, it just so happens they had planned on doing a walk thru the following week anyway. Next Wednesday we will go with them and get to check out the inside of the houses to make sure they are being kept up. We drove around Cottonwood, and boy this place is really growing, they say the population is 9,000 plus but I think it is more then that. It’s good that it’s growing because that means the house values are going up.

Friday the 13th
I took Valley for a long walk around the 2 lakes they have here, Dave joined us at the end on his bike. When we got back we got ready to go, we planned on driving by our 2 rentals then go driving around looking at the properties Century 21 had given us. We first checked out the house in Cottonwood, which the neighborhood is still really nice and the front of the house looked great. Then we drove to Cornville and while driving around checking out the houses that are up for sale, this man waves us over. Can’t blame him, we had driven up the street 3 times, and it is a dead end street, so we stopped to talk to him. He is in real estate and wanted to know it we needed help, or were we interested in buying something. We told him we owned the house next door to him already and we were just driving by checking out the neighborhood. We ended up talking to him for about an hour, hearing about the real estate market and talking about the area. He gave us some areas to look at for buying more land, so we took off to check those out too. The rain had started; it would start and stop but thank goodness nothing heavy so we drove around for a couple hours checking out areas. When we got back we had lunch then Dave drove to Sedona to get his tire fixed. Forgot to mention that when Dave rode his bike to catch up to Valley and I he had rode on some dirt trails too and when we were leaving to check out the rentals we noticed that the front tire on his bike was flat. All the bike shops in Cottonwood have closed down and that’s why he had to drive to Sedona. I started this blog by saying nothing bad had happened so far on this Friday the 13th, but the flat tire was one think that did happen.
I think that’s it for the last 3 days, will write more later.