We are in the middle of our second year of full-time RV living in Arizona. For those of you who haven’t followed us for long, we are members of the Thousand Trails program. It allows us to stay at campgrounds and RV resorts around the country for a yearly fee. The program we bought into lets us stay at most Thousand Trails or Encore parks for up to three weeks at a time. It has gone well so far this winter. That is until we arrived at Countryside RV Resort in Apache Junction. We stayed here last year and had a reasonably good experience, aside from our cat almost being eaten by a horned owl. The first time we came, we had to stop by the day before our stay began because they had received a package for us which we were not expecting to arrive that quickly. While we were there to pick up the package, they had the thought to have us look at the lot they had assigned us. We took a look and decided it was too cramped to easily back our trailer into. So, they let us pick another available lot, and we found one that we could easily get in and out of. When we made our reservation for this year, we added a note to the comments that we would like that same lot. However, when we got our confirmation, we had been assigned a different space. When we arrived on that Saturday afternoon, there was another RV in our spot. We asked the RV owner, and he said he had been assigned a different spot but could not get into it, so he took this one. The issue we found was, there is no one in the office at this place on weekends, so our best option was to take a spot near the one we were assigned to, and we could sort it out on Monday. Unfortunately, on doing that we were informed we would have to move to the spot the person who took our original space was assigned, as there was someone coming in a few days to use the space we took, and they were going to be there for several weeks. Not a pleasant start to our stay at this resort.
We learned that Thousand Trails has made an arrangement with another RV resort in Apache Junction, and the manager of that place was actually going to be here at Countryside one afternoon that week. So we went to see her and mentioned that we were frequent campers in this area and would be interested in taking a look at the new place, which is known as Meridian RV Resort. We went over there and found it to be quite nice and decided that it would be part of our future itinerary in the area. I will confess I hoped that the manager was there to address some concerns with the operation at Countryside but can’t confirm that was the case. But I can dream, I guess.
We have three more campground reservations before we leave Arizona in May. We have previously stayed at two of them, so the new one is in Casa Grande. We hope that it will be part of the route we take as we go through the fall and winter on our travels. And that we can keep our cat from being threatened by wildlife. Fingers crossed.
