I have always wanted a travel trailer. I don't know if it was the astronauts climbing out of the capsule into the Airstream, or the dream of the open road not constrained by any need to stop at a particular location. Anyway Jamie and I have talked about getting a trailer for a while as we love being outdoors and would love to explore the southwest more than we have been able to the past few years. Although the two of us like tent camping, with four little kids our length of stay in a location seems to be around one night before the lack of sleep makes the experience less than enjoyable. In addition to our own desire to get a trailer, a number of our friends in town have picked up vintage trailers and have started to restore them and have loved the ability to check camp in some of the numerous parks in New Mexico. Well on Friday morning we went out to a guy who rebuilds trailers in the east mountains to look at a number of options he had out there. He was great in helping us figure out what type of camper we were looking for, but unfortunately didn't have any of them available. Well during homeschool that morning, I was looking for campers on Craigslist in ABQ but couldn't find anything. I had been told by a friend at work to look in Phoenix as a lot of become available there. Well within seconds I found the exact model. It had been posted 13 minutes prior to my searching and the price was a third of what these normally go for. So I called him up and we found ourselves on our way to Phoenix AZ within an hour.
On our drive down the owner of the trailer called us once and texted us to make sure we were still coming. We were pretty nervous he was going to sell to somebody else even though we were driving seven hours to get there. Well we showed up that night and he had saved it for us. It turns out there had been 20 offers after us for the trailer, but he was nice enough to not sell it out from under us. Although that morning we had no intentions to be trailer owners, by the end of the day we had ourselves a 1979 Mallard 20ft trailer.
I had been tempted to sleep in the trailer for the night, but seeing as we didn't pack any sleeping bags, and the trailer needs some work cleaning and fixing up, we decided to stay at a hotel that night. In the morning I needed to have a 7 prong, lights/trailer break connector on our car as we only have the 4 prong trailer lights. Unfortunately it took a while which left Jamie and the kids at the hotel for the most of the morning. Never fear though as they are very good at being creative and having fun.
"Thing Finders" with their treasures
Roaming the golf course looking for lost balls
One of the fun crazy parts of the trip was our good friends from ABQ were flying into Phoenix to pick up a car and we were able to meet up at an In-n-out for lunch.
Here's a picture of our beautiful, vintage trailer being pulled by our traverse. Not quit the sleek airstream i was going for, but it'll do. :)
Originally we had planned to come back Saturday night, but due to the cabling taking a while to get done (had some fuse trouble with the brake controller) and the fact we had to go pretty slow on the climb out of Phoenix we weren't going to make it home till really late. As we hit Flagstaff we hit a snow storm. Unfortunately though every hotel room in Flastaff was taken as university started up again on the Monday and students were coming back. The next town was Winslow so I hopped on Google and found a decently priced and ranked hotel (most were very low ranked in the town). We were in for a big surprise though with the hotel. The hotel was a historic Harvey House, a chain of hotels, restaurants, and hospitality houses. The Harvey company is credited with helping to civilize the west in the 19th century as well as making the first restaurant chain. Unfortunately there are very few of them left and this is the last inn on the historic Sante Fe track.
La Posada hotel in Winslow,AZ
Our room was a beautifully decorated with a southwest theme.
We were surprised with the quality of food at the restaurant. It was amazing! Jamie had prickly pear cactus bread pudding for breakfast. I had a green chile polenta which was delicious as well.
The hotel backs up to the train tracks where not only the Amtrak train stops, but also every freight train that comes through the southwest. The kids were in seventh heaven watching the trains come through every 5 minutes.
If you are ever travelling through the southwest on I-40 we highly recommend you stop at La Posada in Winslow AZ.
Finally on our way out we stopped at the "corner in Winslow, Arizona" made famous in the Eagles song.
Standin on the corner in Winslow, Arizona
Stay tuned for tales of trailer remodel...
