We have arrived in Chandler in preparation for the FMCA's (Family Motor Coach Association) Rally. We elected to stay in the area where we can run our generator for limited hours (6am-11pm) rather than pay for electric as we have found at other rallies that the electric that is provided just for the event is, uhm, unreliable, so we end up running our generator after having paid an additional charge for electricity.
We left the campground in Marana relatively early. We had planned to stop at a place that a fellow Blue Bird owner had told us about in Eloy to get our aluminum wheels polished. We didn't find the shop he recommended (M&M), but we found a different one...
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| Either Babe or Sal (or someone else) was outside and waving us in to their lot... |
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| Their building was not real impressive... |
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| But they did a good job... |
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| On all the wheels... |
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| Really nice! |
Then we headed on up to Chandler... they had given us directions to get to the lot where they wanted us to gather up (we had our tickets set for "Will Call" so we didn't have to get them via the mail), so we picked up our package of information in the holding area parking lot.
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| The rigs unhooking their tow vehicles in preparation to go to their parking lot. |
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| Rigs lined up to leave the holding area - and the ones beyond that line are coming into the holding area. |
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| We were waiting to get out of the holding area, while the motor homes on the left side were coming in to the holding area. |
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| The rigs in front of us followed their lead car to get to their parking area... but there was no lead car available for us, so we had to wait for a while... |
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| And still more rigs coming in while we waited... we ended up waiting a total of about 20 minutes to get a "follow me" car to take us to our parking area. |
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| Finally several "follow me" cars arrived - we were told to follow the red one... she eventually found the parking lot where we were to go (after stopping at a wrong one first). |
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| We are parked in lot F on either 8th or 10th street.... |
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| We put our mat down underneath the area where the generator fan blows as we are on sand/gravel and didn't want to kick up a lot of dust. |
After getting parked, we decided to try walking over to where the events would be held... we needed to find a place where we would turn in our emergency contact form to get our welcome bag.
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| We walked through an area where they will have electric hookups for the rigs. They have a large generator for providing the electricity, and there is wiring laid across the parking area with places to plug in strategically located along the line. |
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| Miss Doozie is parked WAY back there (you may be able to see a flag just to the right of some temporary lights - we are to the left of that rig with the flag - we now have our flag up so we can find Miss Doozie more easily). |
We ended up chatting with some of the security folks, and a golf cart gave us a ride to find the welcome bag folks. Then we had the challenge of finding our way back to Miss Doozie... thankfully we had marked her location on our phones in googlemaps. As we arrived back to our parking area, there were ladies distributing welcome bags right at the corner of our "street"! But, we got a bit of an idea of how far we'll need to walk to get to the seminars and activities.
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| A picture from the top of Miss Doozie over our "Lot F" - it looks like there are still a number of spaces available, but we've heard from folks we met in Yuma that they are parked way over in the holding area lot. |
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| Another picture from our roof - I *think* the area over to our left is handicapped, which would imply that we are "close" to the event area. I guess "close" is a relative term. |
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| We're on a bit of an uneven spot of ground so Miss Doozie's front tires are off the ground. |
We're looking forward to a great time here! Tomorrow we only have events for first time attendees and orientation for our volunteer task of helping with the coffee bar. The actual seminars and other events start Tuesday.
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