Rancho Sonora Inn and RV Park

We stayed for about 10 days at Rancho Sonora Inn and RV Park just south of Florence, Arizona. It is an older park but in really nice condition, well kept, we thought we would give you a quick look around this RV Park, it is a great place to stay.

This is the entry into the facility. The inn portion has been here since the 1930’s and seems quite nice though we did not get into any of the rooms nor accommodations. There is a swimming pool at the Inn and it is available for use by those of us staying in the RV Park. There are about 85 sites in the RV Park with a few more currently being added. The RV Park has been here a little over 20 years.

This is the old water tank. It served the needs of the establishment for many years and has been replaced by a larger storage facility that sits on the ground. This tank is still used for some of the irrigation on the landscaping and certainly provides visual appeal.

They have their own well here and the water is rather good. There are many locations in Arizona where you don't want to drink the water, it has a terrible taste and way too many minerals and other substances. In those locations you buy drinking water.

This building is the office and clubhouse. There is a great kitchen, a large laundry facility, reading library and all the other accoutrements you would find in such a dwelling.

We don’t usually take pictures of dumpsters, however, the one on the right side presented some notoriety. It is for recycle and only recycle. You can put all sorts of stuff in there, glass, cardboard, plastics of various types, newspaper, cans etc. etc. In our travels around Arizona and for that matter in many RV parks recycling has been very limited to non-existent. It was refreshing to see this approach. It is a great dumpster and we like to recycle when we can.

This image gives you an idea of some of the landscaping. Since the park has been here for quite a while the cactus and trees are fairly large. The staff does an excellent job in keeping the grounds looking really great.

Here beside one of the RVs is a very nice Lemon Tree. There are several lemon trees scattered around the park. The winters, as you can imagine, are not very cold but the flip side is the summers are very, very hot. We are not far from Phoenix and it gets beastly hot here in the summer.

This shows part of one of the RV sites. Not all sites are this large or this nicely landscaped but several of them are. Many people come here year after year and have the same site, many of those folks make personal improvements to their sites. The sites vary in size from fairly small to rather large, as is this one.

As we mentioned, much of the park has very nice, natural landscaping. Here we see some, what look like, dead Flamingos lying on the ground. Perhaps the heat caused their demise. No the pink colored prickly cactus you see in the background was not dyed or painted to match the color of the flamingos, that is the natural color of that species of prickly pear.

Here we are looking at the courtyard for the Inn. It is a tranquil and well done setting with the rooms around the perimeter of the open area. Again we see lots of nice, refreshing landscaping.

Here is our site. It is fairly large for a commercial RV park. Many of the places in southern Arizona have the RVs packed in really close to each other, much closer together than you see here; we call them sardine parks because that’s how close they get spaced together. Each site here has a concrete patio and table and in our case we have room for our two Westies enclosure and our truck. For our taste, it is a very nice site.

This view is looking down the road from in front of our site. There are several sites that are not occupied, as of yet. In the next few weeks the park will fill up. The snowbird season gets into high swing starting in mid December and continues through March.

For example; there is a high end RV Park not far from here where you can stay from September through January for about $1200, total. Starting in January it is $1,150 a month. It is a fancy place with lots of activities and things to do. You can see the premium they charge for the snowbird months.

For comparison, here at Rancho Sonora it is $450 a month for a site but we were told that rate may go up.

The folks that are living in this RV are from North Dakota in a town 10 miles south of the Canadian Border. They come down here for 5 months every year and have been coming here for 22 years. They leave their trailer parked here, pay a storage fee, and drive their car back and forth to North Dakota. The trailer originally had colorful decals but the blistering Arizona sun caused them to come off. The sun raises quite a havoc with the RVs here in Arizona.

When you leave your RV here over summer many people recommend that you leave buckets of water set around inside the RV to help maintain some humidity. People who live here year round will go into you RV periodically and refill the buckets.

The plant in the center between the two Saguaro is an Ocotillo and is located along the access road near the entrance to the park. It is a plant and not a true cactus. It is a large shrub with long cane-like unbranched spiny stems. The stems don't have leaves in normal dry conditions, here it is being watered and looks lush and green. In the desert area when it rains the Ocotillo develops leaves and beautiful flowers that attract hummingbirds.

We hope you enjoyed a brief tour around Rancho Sonora Inn and RV Park. It is a great place to stay, wonderful landscaping, many large sites, and excellent people to meet and chat with. It is not far from shopping in case you need anything and close to great hiking trails and wonderful eateries.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
All the best – George & Deanna

Catalina State Park - A Brief Look

Catalina State Park is one of the wonderful State Parks in Arizona. There are a lot of hiking trails in the park of various lengths and difficulty. The park and trails get a lot of use from bike riders to hikers. The RV sites are well spaced with a lot of room between most of them. They only have water and electric at their sites with centrally located dump station facilities available to get rid of waste water from your trailer holding tanks.

This is a map showing the location of Catalina State Park. It is just north of Tucson located in an area called Oro Valley. The park is nestled up against the Catalina Mountains.

This image was taken at our campsite and if you look around you might see birds hiding in the bushes and dry grasses. They can be difficult to spot.

The one hiding in the grasses in the image above came out and it is a Greater Roadrunner. We saw them in several places and we heard the coyotes almost every night but did not see them chasing the road runner.

As we had mentioned earlier there are a lot of trails to hike in Catalina State Park. This is a one mile purportedly easy hike through some ruins left by the Hohokam Native American many, many years ago.

This was a neat sign at the start of the trail. We saw many lizards along the trail but we are not sure if we saw a Spiny Lizard. They are really neat desert critters.

It was wonderful to see this group of young school children out on a tour along the trail. There was a State Park Guide who was teaching them about the Hohokam ruins and the desert environment. It seemed to be an active, student participation exercise where they were asked probing questions about the surroundings and the flora and fauna. It was also refreshing to see no smart phones in use by any student.

Unfortunately none of the literature we had read mentioned any stairs. There were lots of them and Yogi, our older Westie, had some difficulty navigating them going up. At one point, most of the way up. Deanna had to carry him from there to the top. He did really well going down the stairs probably like the old horse heading back to the barn, they can go very fast.

Once up the stairs you are on kind of a plateau and you can see the mountains rising beyond. It is great country with open vistas in all directions.

There was a variety of cactus along the trail. Here is a barrel cactus.

This ruin was not from the Hohokam Native Americans that lived here from about 1100-1250 rather from a rancher that was in the area in the early 1900s. The enclosures left over from the Hohokam were largely piles of rocks and not really very discernible as dwellings. We think this small structure was one of the earlier “Tiny Houses” albeit without the conveniences of running water and air conditioning. It looks to be a tough place to live.

This is very nice Saguaro Cactus specimen. It is large with many arms and appeared to be in great condition.

We are now back down off the trail, Yogi has successfully maneuvered the steps to get back to the truck and we are all safe and sound.

This is a Verdin, a small bird seen quite frequently in the southwest. The dark spot that you see on the shoulder is actually red in color. The shadows from the trees muted the colors. You can see several oranges cut in half and skewered onto the branches of the tree. The Verdin and many other birds love to eat the pulp and sweet juice from the oranges.

There are no instructions as to how to use the hummingbird feeder and this Verdin is trying to figure out how to get to all the sugar water. We are not sure why he has chosen this approach as at other times they readily fed from the feeder.

We saw several different butterflies while at Catalina State Park. This shows the top side of an Empress Leilia or Leilia hackberry butterfly. This was the very first visitor to the oranges that we put in the trees. It is amazing to us how quickly they can find the oranges. Several of them were in at one time feeding on the orange juice.

If we thought birds were hard to identify, we get quickly and easily confused with butterflies. This image shows the same Empress Leilia sitting in the same location as in the image above but with its wings folded so you see the underside of the wings. There is quite a difference in appearance.

This was just a fun image we had taken earlier, at a different location, of a bird called a Grebe with a fish. We think it is a Clark’s Grebe but in the area where the picture was taken there are both Western and Clark Grebes and during the winter months the visual differences between the two can be quite subtle and indistinguishable. In a Clark’s Grebe the line of the black cap goes above the eye and in the Western the black cap goes below the eye but during winter plumage this distinction is not reliable. The fishing appears to be good.

We hope you enjoyed the brief tour around a small part of Catalina State Park. It is a fascinating place and quite heavily used by daily visitors not just us campers. It is after all close to Tucson.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. All the best – George & Deanna

Fields Station Oregon

We are heading towards Arizona for the winter. We often try to take back roads and in this excursion we ended up stopping at Fields Station for breakfast as we were passing through, it is along some back roads.

As you can see from the map, Fields Station is not located near much of anywhere, you have to go a ways to get there, the roads are in great shape, and the journey is worth the effort. On Thursday we left Walla Walla, traveled south through John Day, down to Burns Oregon and stopping overnight at the Narrows just south of Burns. On Friday we headed further south stopping at Fields Station for a bite to eat.

Fields Station is noted for great Milkshakes and Hamburgers. In the spring it can be a wonderful spot for vagrant and rare birds as the birds migrate north. They do sell gasoline and diesel, have a small store with limited supplies, and great food at the cafe.

This is the small kitchen. The lady is getting the grill warmed up. She is one of the owners and does the cooking. This kitchen is located in the open area that also contains the small seating space for the restaurant.

How many burgers have they sold this year you might ask. Here is a sign that they keep on the wall and update the count as they sell burgers. As of the date we were there they had sold 5,036 burgers. They are all half pound burgers and they have a variety of options. The basic burger costs $10.50 and is served with your choice of chips or french fries.

Fields Station is a long ways from supplies. The lady mentioned they go to Burns, Oregon once a week for supplies. It is a distance of ether 112 miles or 129 miles depending on which route you take. Once every three weeks they travel to Bend for supplies which is 242 miles by the shortest route. The only items delivered are the gasoline, diesel, and propane. All other items they purchase themselves.

We had both ordered coffee and was told coffee is self-serve and here is the coffee pot and mugs. The coffee was great. The restaurant area itself is really small with a counter and a few chairs and a couple of small tables so serving yourself is no problem.

We were a little early in the day and so opted to pass on the hamburgers. We had one on an earlier trip through and it was wonderful. Here is the cheese omelet that George ordered. It was served on a large; we mean large, bed of hash browns. It came with toast as well but we opted to pass on the toast.

Deanna enjoys a great hash mixture and on the menu there was “Walt’s Hash” so she ordered that item. It was as well served on a bed of hash browns, lots and lots of hash browns.

Since Fields is noted for hamburgers and milkshakes we have to mention the shakes and since the first of the year they have sold 7,001 milkshakes.

What kind of shakes can you order? Here is the order board and they are all priced at $6.75. Again on the earlier excursion we had one, it was rich, spoon eating thick, wonderful flavor and worth every penny, but we passed this time.

So that is Fields Station, a little out of the way but well worth the excursion.

In our opinion we would recommend having the hamburger and shake as opposed to the breakfast fare. The omelets and hash were fine, nothing wrong with them but the burgers and shakes were, in our past experience, fabulous.

If you are ever near Fields Station be sure and stop in for a bite to eat, it is only about 21 miles north of Denio, Nevada so not far out of the way at all.

Actually the reference to Denio is tongue in cheek, this place is certainly close to Denio but still a long way from anywhere.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments. Safe travels and have fun. – George & Deanna

Sumi's Kitchen - A Fabulous Japanese Eatery

We took a drive the other day looking around the country. Montana is beautiful and wild and certainly most enjoyable when it is not winter, our home on wheels is not the best living accommodation in the cold and snows of the winter. We stopped in Eureka, Montana for a bit of lunch at Sumi’s Kitchen, you need to eat here when next in Eureka or for that matter just come on up here for lunch, it is a great little place.

On this map, the red marker in the upper center shows the location of Eureka. Spokane, WA is indicated with a yellow circle on the left side while Missoula, MT is shown on the lower right with another yellow mark. This is not Eureka, Washington nor Eureka, California this is Montana and as you can see from the solid line across the top of the map it is close to the border with Canada.

Downtown Eureka consists of this main highway that runs through town. Eureka is a fascinating though not huge town. Before and after we took this picture there were a lot of recreational vehicle traffic both coming from and heading to Canada and other locations in the area. We must have just miss timed the RVs.

We had parked a short distance from the main street in the shade of some large trees, walked up the block and on rounding the corner saw this sign on the door. Since we were looking for a place for lunch we decided to give it a try. Much of the food available for lunch seems to be hamburgers and fries or some such fare so a contrasting Japanese stir fry dish sounded really appealing.

On the wall is this collection of signs. As we will see in the next photo Sumi is more towards the skinny end of the spectrum and not the fat side so should she be trusted?

This is the cook and owner Sumi Sugiyama. There is a series of woks on the stove beside her and that is where she crafts the food. There are no other cook nor sous chefs or prep help, just her. There is a neat lady who is the waitress and general helper but Sumi does all the cooking. There is a sign on the wall that says they only have one cook and your meal will be cooked to order. The little sign does not include this comment but we found out "there is no fast food here just great food".

Deanna ordered hot green tea and they brought this beautiful tea cup with lid. It is a fascinating work of art for a tea cup.

We have a very good friend named Rodger who really likes Tofu so whenever we get the chance we order that dish in his honor. This is Sumi’s wonderful rendition of Tofu and Vegetables. Deanna ordered Chicken Hunan which was spicy with a wonderful flavor. Both dishes were excellent and the pot stickers that we had as an appetizer were better than good. We are certain that all the dishes, regardless of what you ordered, would be fabulous. And yes Rodger the Tofu was great. 

This shows the list of daily specials that is posted on the wall. As you can see it is not an expensive place to eat. Great food and inexpensive prices, one cannot beat this combination almost anywhere we have eaten.

Here on the counter is a Maneki Neko also known as a Lucky Cat or Fortune Cat. It is really not waving good bye rather if the left paw is raised, as in this case, this supposedly attracts customers. If the right paw is raised, that invites good fortune and money. It must work because it certainly attracted us as customers.

Unfortunately Sumi’s does not have any dessert and what is better after a long day of travel and a great meal than dessert. Fortunately in Eureka there is a homemade ice cream store just up the street called G’s. Of course we stopped there and the ice cream was wonderful, rich, creamy, and very flavorful. G’s is a really busy place but a worthwhile stop.

On your next sojourn through Eureka, Montana you must stop at Sumi’s for a bite to eat. They may be closed Saturday and Sunday but open for a great dining experience during the rest of the week. Give them a call to confirm their hours as we have seen different open and closed times Be sure and eat at Sumi’s, great food and neat people.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
All the best – George & Deanna

Not Snow - Rvs - Walk Your Dog - Horse Finches

Here are just a few extraneous images that were not included in any previous post. This is a short but fun little post.

This is River Oaks RV Park and the lineup of RV’s. This is where we stayed in Oroville, WA during most of June. The park is by no means full and for most of the time we were there only four or five other RVs were in the park with us. The park is only 6 miles from the border crossing and it gets busy with folks stopping for the night, buying groceries, and fueling up before crossing into Canada or heading up the Alcan to Alaska. Behind the lineup of RVs is the Similkameen River which comes out of Canada, joins the Okanagan River and then heads south to join the Columbia.

No this image does not show it snowing. There is a row of large cottonwood trees along the river right behind our RV and the Cottonwoods are releasing their seeds. It was interesting, the center portion of the row of RVs in the above image, had about 90 percent of the cotton while the sites on either end had limited exposure to the white stuff.

Here is the cotton seed on the ground. We wondered why the world is not completely covered with Cottonwood Trees.

We thought this an interesting comparison in Trailer sizes. The one in front, a brand called Scamp, is tiny. We were unsure how people actually lived in the trailer. Next is a more standard travel trailer followed by a larger fifth wheel unit. There is something for everyone.

Oops, then this behemoth parked at a pull through site and spent the night. There is even a small tow behind trailer behind the big Carbon fifth wheel. In many western states you can tow a trailer behind the fifth wheel trailer. Not sure it is legal in Washington State but in many other states it is. One would not even begin to think about backing up this combination at all, not no way, not no how. These larger units are called toy haulers because they have a large garage area in the back where ATVs, motorcycles or other toys can be stored. They must have lots and lots of toys.

We had an image of Tank, the large dog seen here, in an earlier post. Here a person is giving Tank a walk using the golf cart or maybe Tank is taking the cart for a walk. We have a friend, Terry, who manages Cranberry RV Park on Long Beach in Washington State and she just got a Golf Cart and she already had two standard size black poodles. Maybe this is how she gets them their exercise.

Now we are in Libby, MT and we have some horses in the field directly behind our trailer. It was most interesting to see several small birds riding on one of the horses. Could they be Brown-headed Cowbirds or were they some other avian species?

On closer examination we found they were Horse Finches, at least that is what they looked like to us. More likely they are a group of juvenile House Finches but they look like Horse Finches to us. They have been riding around for a while as evidenced by the bird droppings on the back of the horse. What fun to ride around and take in the countryside on the back of a big horse.

These were the last few fun images left from our brief time spent in Oroville, Washington. It is a great place and a worthwhile stop. We hope you enjoyed this short post.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
All the best – George & Deanna