Friday, Nov 9th

It was a bit cooler today, but was still in the high 70's, although the wind blew hard all day. 
  We got up and were out checking out garage sales early in the morning.  There were a lot of them in our area and Marg did manage to find a few things.  I bought 8 pocket books, all westerns.  It was funny I walked up to one sale and the guy said - Where do I know you from?  It turns out they were in Carefree a few years back, but now have a house in an area having a community wide sale.  It turns out they were almost right behind us one year.  We saw one that was huge on a rural like property as a fund raiser for abandoned animals.  That was where I bought the books.
  After lunch we went to Walmart in Mesa to deal with our cell phones down here.  We have been having trouble with voice clarity on the our flip phone and our other phone contract expired and needs a new SIM card.  We picked up a new flip phone, yes Charlene a new flip phone and a time card to renew the expired one.  By the way the flip phone was $19.98, what a deal.  I wanted to try my new VISA and fortunately it worked just fine. 
  On the way back I stopped for fuel at a Circle K.  The points we earn at Fry's grocery store can also be redeemed at Circle K and as luck would have it we have already earned 10 cents a gallon discount, so that made it $2.73 per gallon, that would be about 61 cents a litre.  Almost all places are pay at the pump now, but you have to enter your ZIP code which is 5 numbers.  I have tried our AZ code, but it doesn't work.  We Canadians don't have a ZIP, so that means a trip in to the store to prepay where you try to estimate how much your tank will hold.  Usually that means picking a number like $50 or $100 and if you want a proper receipt, a second trip where they print it out.  A real pain.  I found out in Montana on the way down that we can use our postal code numbers, even though there are 3 letters & 3 numbers.  We just use the 3 numbers followed by 2 zeros.  I've only been doing this for 10 years, I wonder how long this has been an available.
  When we got back, Kenny & Doris stopped in for a bit.  He went to the Mesa Market and ordered batteries from the same Dr. Battery that I did.  He even ordered the same ones that are supposed to be the best available and the guy said he would do Kenny's when he finishes ours on Monday.  His prices are pretty competitive and include installation right here in the park, all new cables, cleaning up the battery brackets and spray painting them.  It's about $100 more than doing them yourself, but it eliminates the mess, the problem of taking the 6 battery cores back plus they clean up the brackets and put a coating on the terminals.  An error in connecting them can be very costly.  For example one of the problems can be not keeping the cables tightly twisted in a 36 volt system.  One of the ladies in our park had someone install hers.  In the process they must have turned the cable causing it to loose some of the twist.  That caused a minor explosion that broke the terminal right off the battery.
  We went to happy today and there was a pretty good sized group there.  It's a good news/bad news thing.  It's nice seeing the camaraderie, but pretty had to carry on much of a conversation at times.  Supper tonight was BBQ burgers, we got some nice ones from Costco.  We have started having them with chips, which is very common here instead of fries.  A common mistake many tourists make is ordering chips when they mean fries down here.