Raising Arizona

A little later than planned, we pulled into the resort at Parker Arizona around 8PM. But before we dive into this tale, I’d like to set a backdrop so you all can understand the story a little better.

Back when we purchased the coach, one of the salesmen tried to “sweeten” the deal with a Colorado River Adventures dealer package which included a one year membership at what we thought was a one year pass to 5 different resorts along the Colorado River. After all, buying an RV is a large purchase, so we didn’t necessarily feel entitled to this “gift”, but we were happy to accept it.

The brochure warned us that we would have to activate our account within 60 days in order to make it valid. So I called the 1800 number that was on the brochure and set up a reservation. A man named Milton gave me the lowdown of what the requirements were when we arrived at the spot. We were required to attend a 90 minute “guided tour” then we were to receive a 5 day stay at no cost which wouldn’t affect 20 free days. (Wait…wait…wait…wait…. I thought we had a one-year membership.) The man continued to informed me that we had 20 free days to use within a year….. hmm.. okay (Here was hint #1)

Since our house was getting torn down, Jeff was working on capturing the last bit of footage of the Ranch. Because of the unpredictability of when we were going to be finished with filming, we kept having to cancel our reservation.  After we were all done with filming and moving, we were finally ready to venture out. However, we had decided to venture north rather than east since we had some friends we wanted to visit. But we just figured we’d hit one of the Colorado River Adventure resorts on the way east so that would give us a nice little break before we made the real journey the southern states. That takes us back to the very first blog post and now sets up the story for this very one.

Okay, so back to how we got into (and out) of AZ.

By the time, we got close to “the cove”, it was pretty dark. Driving a large piece of equipment in the dark is not easy especially when you are pulling a tow vehicle. If you pass your destination, it’s almost impossible to put the coach in reverse, so one passenger will have to get out of the car, unhitch the tow car, let the driver reverse the coach, THEN re-hitch the car back on the coach…. (whew… did I miss anything?!). I guess you could flip a U-turn but even that’s hard if you have limited space. As we drove along this road, we noticed MANY RV campgrounds that bordered the river. (Which one of these were ours?!)We saw a large billboard for a campground that offered a $10 dollar a night campsite! That was nice to keep in the back of our pocket if we decided we really enjoyed hanging by the river. At the bottom of the billboard (in fine print) revealed the bestower of this great deal…..  Emerald Cove Resorts…hmmm… (hint #2).

As if we were nearing a Las Vegas hotel, a GIGANTIC lit up billboard with a huge arrow pointing to the entrance lead our way. When we pulled in, we were deterred by what looked like a toll booth. The woman at the booth asked us our names and asked if we were registered. She gave us a whole bunch of papers and asked us if 9AM was good for our 90-minute sales presentation. (sale presentation?!! I thought it was a guided tour… you know, like the ones you take at the gym?!)

A bit taken aback by this information, we asked if we could schedule the “meeting” for another day since it was late and chances were that we would sleep in and not make the meeting (come on… we were being honest). It was funny because her face suddenly changed and she basically just said, “NO”.

“Oooookay… so what if we miss the meeting? We are staying for 5 days, couldn’t we just go one of those days?” we asked.

 She slowly responded with, ”Well, then I guess you would do a meeting the next day if you ended up missing the initial meeting.”

So off we went to our campsite. Emerald Cove Resort is absolutely HUGE! There had to be about 800 sites on this huge piece of property bordering the river. I can imagine that when the weather was warmer, it would be a gorgeous place to vacation. However, it was January and FREEZING (like I’m talking 45-degree-in-the-middle-of-the-day cold). BRRR.

Campsite at Emerald Cove Resort... before another camper came in next to us

Side view

Sure enough, 9:05AM the next morning we heard a loud knock on the door of the coach. Of course we slept through this “wake-up call”. The next one came at 10AM. All the shades of the coach were closed so we ignored the “call” and lingered in bed a while longer (HEY! It was a long drive and we needed our beauty rest). When we finally were up and making some breakfast, we opened up a couple of curtains. As if someone was outside monitoring any movements in the coach, a couple minutes later, ANOTHER knock came to the door. We had no choice but to answer it.

At first this woman was civil enough, letting us know that we missed our meeting. She then tried a guilt method by asking if we could be at the sales office in 10 minutes because our “guide” had been waiting there since 8:45AM.  After we asked her if we could participate in the meeting the next day, she suddenly turned “ugly”. She huffed and rudely said that she would go ask and hopped in her golf cart and sped off. About 5 minutes later, she returned and told us that we could attend a meeting the next day but we had to be there promptly at 9AM and if we missed this one, they would charge us $50 dollars a night for the remainder of our stay!

It seems we had just got ourselves into a timeshare scam!!!! We should have known better with all these weird hints! Needless to say, after she left, we did some research online and sure enough, we read a good handful of testimonials from people who got scammed into getting a “free” membership at the Colorado River Adventures. A few people said that some of the meetings lasted 3 hours. Other commentators said that if you didn’t buy from them, they would sometimes become hostile! Some of the salesmen would try and personalize themselves by sharing stories about their life in order to make it harder for you to say no to their sales tactics. After reading these stories, we decided that we wanted to be prepared to go to battle with the sales crew the next morning.  There is a WEALTH of information online about how to avoid getting sucked into a timeshare scam. Some of them are actually pretty funny. Apparently there are some jokesters that attended the sales pitch in some ridiculous costumes. The majority of them just tell you to look uninterested and answer as little questions as possible.

We decided that we would set a timer with an obnoxious alarm that went off right at the 90-minute mark. We didn’t want to get too outlandish and dress in weird costumes…. Really we just wanted to get this done and over with and enjoy the rest of our stay.

We were free the rest of our day so we decided to walk the grounds and see what the fuss was all about. It’s not too bad of a campground. There are some beautiful beachfront sites, but we found out that those were reserved for “members only”.  

"members only" beachfront sites... pretty nice!

Nice lake view

It was too cold for people to come and hang on the beach...

The rest of our walk was cut short because it was just too darn cold out! Not to mention we felt paranoid because we “broke the rules”, missed our meeting and now felt like we were being watched everywhere.

Nevertheless, we felt pretty active, so we decided to check out a skate park in Lake Havasu City. There are some parts of Lake Havasu City that are actually really pretty. I can only describe the background as what you would expect out of the wilderness in Arizona. There are lots of red rocks and interesting rock formations. On our way to Lake Havasu City which was about 30 minutes away, we noticed there were many free camp sites where you could “rough” it. This meaning you could just park in the wilderness without any hookups. The scenery in the wilderness is really beautiful! That’s more what we were looking for rather than luxury. One of our main goals is to be able to wake up and open the windows to a beautiful peaceful setting, not a nice view into your neighbor’s coach.

Lake Havasu City

A nice view of the lake from the skate park

The skate park at Lake Havasu

Cedar playing with the rhino

A walk down the streets of Lake Havasu

Ken's Pizza and Pasta had a really good pesto pizza!

 The next morning we woke up at 8, made some coffee and breakfast, and got dressed. If any of you really know us, you know we are notorious for being fashionable late (most of the time not on purpose). Anyway, we were running 5 minutes late. As we were walking toward the sales building, the same woman who knocked on our door the day before was riding her golf cart in our direction. (Was she coming to fetch us?!) Yes, she was because she pulled up and asked if we wanted to get a ride. It was seriously like 20 feet away so we politely rejected the offer. She then turned around and drove back to the sales office.

The sales meeting

Well, this part wasn’t as bad as we’ve read or heard. Yes, it was painful to sit through a sales pitch for an hour and a half, but the salesman wasn’t that bad. I maintained my uninterested demeanor and Jeff was actually the one who seemed engaged. We did set an alarm because we really didn’t want to have to sit there for more than we had to. During this sales pitch, we found out that our “membership” was a limited membership to get us in the door to introduce us to an offer for the real membership. Apparently, ours was limited to 20 days that we could use within a year that could only be used at the campground activated and only could be used every 60 days. Some other minor hindrance was that you could not come on major holidays, or weekends, and you had to stay in 5 day increments. If you decided to leave early, your stay would still be considered 5 days.

Cedar and Jeff listening intently to the "pitch"

The salesman had to go to the bathroom so we had a couple of minutes to goof around.

A silly video that they made us watch

I felt weird taking a photo of the guy directly, so I managed to get a behind photo of him as he walked to the bathroom

Watching the video

A weird thing about timeshares is that you can't ever get rid of them. You pay an large amount up front, then you pay a yearly due for "maintenance". This will go on for the rest of your life until you either will it to your children or sell it to another person. And we all know how hard it is to sell a time share! I guess if you are using it all the time, it would make sense to own one.

Cedar's extreme smile

When time came around for the end of the meeting, the salesman basically said, so are you gonna buy anything? Of course we weren’t, so he gave us our free gifts and we were off. I think the salesman understood that we weren’t going to buy anything, so he must have felt it would have been a waste of breath to keep us there any longer than we had to. Not to mention, Cedar was making a mess of their sales room, so I’m sure they wanted to get us out of there!

I could tell the salesman was a little put off by our rejection of buying into their program. I won’t lie, it made us feel uncomfortable and unwelcome at their resort. Needless to say, even though we had three more free days of camping, we just wanted to get the heck out of there! The energy was really negative surrounding the resort and we saw that in the short couple of days we stayed there. We were able to get some goodies out of them though!! (with some restrictions of course)

We got a 50 dollar check, 100 dollar rebate in gas receipts, and a 50 dollar gift certificate to Red Lobster

It was a real shame that we felt obligated to leave Emerald Cove Resorts. Since it’s a short 5 hour drive from San Diego, my little sisters Charline and Chantal were due to meet us out in Arizona. Now we had to find another location to meet up with them.

getting the heck out of Lake Havasu

We didn’t want to go north, even though Flagstaff was an option. At the time Flagstaff was 15 degrees and snowing which rendered our decision to choose a southern route. We decided on Casa Grande, Arizona. We had a handful of campgrounds to choose from with our camping discount membership and it was an easy shot from San Diego since the I-8 lead right to the area. 

This was a grocery store that was in Casa Grande called Frys. It was like a gloried Wal-mart. Seriously this is one side where you could buy food.....

And you turn around and this is the other side where they sold BBQs, furniture, and even bed sheets!

They even sold rugs!!

When we arrived in Casa Grande, we pulled into our first RV resort. We were stopped by a guard and we asked if we could get a site for a couple of nights. The guard, an older gentleman, then asked Jeff if he was 55 or over. We laughed. I guess most of Casa Grande is a retirement community! We finally found one that was age appropriate and we able to stay for the next few days.

By this time, Charline and Chantal had come out to visit.

Charline.. the middle sister

Chantal... the baby

Watching a show on the telly...

 

Since there are always restrictions with any kind of discount, we were no longer welcome at our discount campground (there was a two day max). We would need a couple more nights since the girls wanted to hang a little longer, so we found a better spot on the outskirts of Casa Grande called Buena Tierra Campgrounds. This was an awesome campground!! We had a private pull through site with nature and wilderness all around us! 

Buena Tierra Campground

Nice mountain views and sunsets!

Desert

We had so much fun with my sisters and we were sad to see them go! Back at home, I saw at least one of them everyday before we left. We are looking forward to their next trip out though!!

Cedar and Char... what a funny smile!

Charline posing at this mall we went to called Arizona Mills

yea.... you read right... a JCPenney OUTLET store!

The front display of the JCPenney outlet store.... Vests must be in season this year.

Chantal trying on one of the vest and Cedar's "opinion" about it...

Some peanut butter/M&M cookies we made.. mmm!

I don’t know if it’s just my luck, but every time I’ve ventured out to our neighboring state of Arizona, I’ve gone in the most extreme of temperatures. I can tell that parts of Arizona are lovely at certain times of the year, so next time we will try to get out there during those seasons! 

There are TA's everywhere along the highway...

Now on to the state of Tex-Mex, cowboys, and Willie Nelson...... Texas!!!!!!!!!!