Last night we went to the Prescott Rodeo, billed as the Worlds Oldest Rodeo. I can't remember the last time I went to a live rodeo performance. It was loads of fun. This whole week is Frontier Days in Prescott and the rodeo runs all week. The contestents enter their events on each day during the week accumulating points to detemine the winner on the last day. This is one of the qualifying rodeos on the way to the championship held in Las Vegas each year. Then on Saturday is a huge parade and the town square hosts music performances and renactors demonstrate old time gunfights in the main street. It's all great fun and very colorful. The parade is interesting to me in that the high school kids who would normally be in a marching band are instead members of horse clubs and they all ride in the parade.
The rodeo starts with a grand en-trance parade with 50 riders each holding flag. There's one flag for each of the sponsors of the rodeo. All but three of the riders were women. The theme of the night was "Tough enough to wear pink" in support of breast cancer awareness.
The first event was something called "the wild horse race" in which several unbroken horses were released at once into the arena and teams of cowboys tried to be first to saddle one and ride it across a finish line. The horses truly went wild when they were released and I think only one team wound up getting a saddle on one. And one unfortunate cowboy wound up with a broken leg.
That was followed by bareback bronc riding and then steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, calf roping and whole host of other events. The program moved right along lasting about two hours with no intermission. It was a perfect night because heavy cloud cover and rain in the area had brought down the 101 daytime temperature to a much more comfortable temp in the 80's.
As we left the stands to make our way to the car, I spotted this spectacular cecropia moth.
She was resting one the sidewalk and had a wingspan of a little over 4 inches. Because the antennae on this one are smaller, it can be identified as a female. They have no mouthparts or digestive system and only live about two weeks after emerging.
Since the location of the bus is about two miles from where I am staying and we didn't stop by yesterday or today, I don't know exactly how far along it is. I know that yesterday there were at least three men working on it and some of the framing had been done.
This a view at the rear of the living area with the existing bathroom at the far left. On the near left, leaning against the wall is the platform for the full size bed and to the right is the base of the twin bunks. The wall being framed in will form the rear wall of the tub/shower area. You can just make out the rear bench seat which is being left in place. It will function as seating and perhaps as a bunk for one of the kids.
John, the owner of the bus, had asked me to see if I could put together a solar array to help charge the batteries so I spent today working on that. We had some surplus solar panels that had formerly been used to power a couple of well pumps. The pumps went bad and the wells were converted to conventional power leaving the solar arrays as surplus. I took the various parts and built up a two hundred watt array by using two 55 watt panel and two 45 watt panels. Each pair was connected in series and then the pairs were connected in parallel. This let us use the most number of panels that we could while staying within the limits of the MPPT controller that was donated to us. It has yet to be mounted to the bus but I tested it after assembly and was pleased to see a steady 38 volt ouput.
The pile to the left in the photo are the seats that were stripped out of the bus awaiting dismantling prior to being carted to the metal recycling center.
Tomorrow it's another trip to Phoenix, this time for a load of hay. I should have a chance to review the current state of the bus so I can update that.
Our present anticipated date to leave is July 8th. We hope to get to Salmon, Utah by the weekend so that we can attend a Bluegrass music festival. We need to be in Anchorage by July 28th. It's about 3600 miles away.
We had originally planned to cruise back to Vancouver, leaving on August 25th., ferry to Seattle and take the train down the West coast. That has now been changed to cruise, then ferry to Seattle on September 1 where we will pick up a 25' class C motorhome from Cruise America. This will allow us the greatest degree of flexibility in our stateside return. In order to enable this, I've extended my stay in the West by a week.
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