Casa Grande, AZ

We’ve now been in Casa Grande since the 13^th of January.  This park is much different than our last one.  It’s not as hippy, funky and the people are a bit harder to get to know.  It’s nice however that we are much closer to a grocery store and can go a bit more spontaneously.  They also have lots of activities here.

Places Visited:

 

Casa Grande:

 

In our early explorations of the area, we found out why the town is called Casa Grande (Spanish for “large house.”)  There are ruins about 30 minutes outside town of an ancient village built by Native American in about 1300.  The people are considered remarkable for the time because they cultivated the desert.  They did this by hand-digging canals with only rough hewn tools (made out of local bushes or trees) to create irrigation canals from the once thriving Gila and Salt rivers.  They grew crops like corn, beans, squash, tobacco, cotton and agave to add to the natural plant foods available such as saguaro, cholla, hedgehog and prickly pear cacti.  They also hunted rabbits, mule deer and big-horned sheep.  During the time the village was occupied, they built the great house of Casa Grande.  No one knows its exact purpose.  Its sheer size and amount of effort and manpower suggested it was a very important building.  An interesting feature of this building are the small holes in the exterior walls.  One of these holes was perfectly positioned so that people gathering inside the building during summer solstice could see the setting of the sun indicating the end of a season.

It isn’t known why the people abandoned the once flourishing village.  During a lecture, we were told that a supposed reason for abandonment could have been years of flash flooding so that the canals could not be maintained.  Another was that the saline in the water may have eventually sterilized the ground so that crops would no longer grow.  Other considered reasons for their disappearance could have been draught, disease, internal strife or earth quakes. 

The site was discovered in 1694 when the first Spanish missionaries arrived and named it Casa Grande.  Unfortunately, for two centuries after Casa Grande’s discovery, visitors and souvenir hunters pillaged the area.  It took scientists until 1892 to have Casa Grande became the nation’s first archeological reserve.

For more information visit http://www.nps.gov/cagr/historyculture/the-ancient-sonoran-desert-people.htm .

Japanese Internment Camp;

 

Memorial on top the Butte

A layout of the camp

We also went exploring for a WWII Japanese Internment Camp.  We became interested in finding this site when we found it on an Arizona map.  There were no road signs.  We tried finding it by driving on canal roads.  We finally saw a truck coming from the opposite direction and Mike asked if he could point us in the right direction.  We were close but would never have found it without his help.  It’s a shame because kids have been partying in the area and leaving cans and broken glass everywhere.  From the top of a small butte there was a memorial plaque.  It was hard to image people being displaced in a place like this.

Motor Home Living:

 

Now for the motor home living update.  It isn’t always glamorous.  When we left Desert Trails we had a hard time getting our all-electronic jacks to retract.  We kept having to reset the panel because an alarm would sound and indicated that our jacks weren’t all the way down or all the way up.  With the help of our neighbor, Bill, who was more persistent than we were, we finally got them up through constantly resetting the panel.  However, when we got to Casa Grande, we had no success with lowering or raising the jacks. 

We called Good Sam to the rescue and they sent Whitfield Auto out to look at our situation.  According to the repair person, the cotter pin holding the movable part of the back jack on the driver’s side had snapped.  They duct-taped it up “literally” so that we could take it down to their shop about 1 mile away.  They were able to fix that one jack in one day (which required removing both back tires on that side) but were still not able to get the entire jack system working again.  By the end of the day they had determined that one of the front jack’s motors had burned out.  Okay, now what?  They told us we could take the motor home back to our spot at Casa Grande where they could fix it at the site. 

About a week ago, they called us when the new engine had arrived and that they would repair the jack on Wednesday (yesterday) or Thursday (today).  I called yesterday morning and they told me that they could possibly do it Wednesday afternoon.  No show on Wednesday.  This morning, I called again.  It turns out the person they had working on our repair was in the hospital because he had been experiencing shortness of breath, etc.  So our new expected repair date is tomorrow.  I’m crossing my fingers on this one.  Thank goodness a three-year warranty was included in the price of our motor home!  I’m also glad that, unlike some other motor homes, we can put our slides out without the jack levelers down.

Well that’s all the news we have for now!