Prescott, AZ

We haven’t been up to a whole lot lately.  One day while driving, Gary noticed a drip on the floor mat near his feet.  It was coming from in under the instrument panel.  He figured it was a leak in a heater hose or connection.  He took it to the dealer and they diagnosed it as a leak in the clutch master cylinder.  We didn’t even know that a clutch system has a master cylinder.  We had to have it replaced.

We also had some squeaks seemingly in the rear end of the car and figured that is was bushings.  Wrong again.  The dealer said the shocks were shot which wasn’t surprising as they likely had about 90,000 miles on them (driving and being towed) .  And if you are replacing the rear shocks, it is also time to replace the front struts and strut mounts as well.  And all that precipitates an alignment too.

Along with a few other minor adjustments, the bill came to over $1,000.  But it all had to be done.

The car needed a good test drive after all of that work, so we took a day trip to Prescott.  It is located up in a mountain valley at over a mile of elevation.  The drive up there is quite a twisting climb.  The road is restricted to vehicles of less than 40 total feet so most trucks can’t even take the road.  On the way, we took the Skull Valley route to avoid some of the mountain side driving.  Prescott has a long history as a cowboy town.  The landscape is very different than at our campground; Prescott is forested with pine trees instead of cacti and palm trees.

People from Phoenix and Tucson head to the mountains around Prescott in the summer to escape the oppressive heat of the lower elevations.  We spent most of our time in the courthouse square.  On one street across from the courthouse is Whiskey Row, an area with a long history of cowboy bars and brothels.  We took in two breweries in that area – Granite Mountain Brewing and Prescott Brewing.  Both were quite good.  It was dark when we left the second brewery and we discovered that the trunks of every single one of the many trees on the courthouse square are wrapped in Christmas lights – a very colorful sight.  We also stopped by an Indian casino in the town, but our Las Vegas luck didn’t carry over to Prescott.