Lake Havasu City, Arizona/New Van Shakedown

How Many Days Before We Kill Each Other?

Feb 08, 2023

So we’ve been here a month and my patience with choosing, buying and assembling various pieces of furniture is virtually nonexistent at this point. Time to take a trip! While I was able to try out the van for a couple of nights when I picked it up, Amy Jo hasn’t had the pleasure except for a short drive around town.

I started researching RV’s a couple of years ago with a rough vision in mind. We are fairly adventurous and we knew we didn’t want our RV to limit where we could go or keep us confined to noisy campgrounds, etc. It soon became apparent that it was going to take some time to source a raw van and then settle on a company to do the build out. Enter the magic of social media! Sometime in August 2022, my Instagram feed presented me with a 2022 Mercedes 4x4 V6 diesel built out almost exactly like we wanted! After a week of back and forth with the company about some upgrades, we had date in September 2022 to pick up our van at Wanderful Wheels LLC in Durango, Colorado.

In a nutshell, there are two reasons why this particular van build out meets our needs so well:

4 wheel drive means we can go just about anywhere.
Solar panels/battery bank/charging system means that we can be completely off grid for up to a week.

So here we go!

We decided to take a long weekend trip down to Lake Havasu and start climbing the learning curve of the van. As an added bonus, we were able to visit our former neighbors/my fishing buddy who are spending the winter in the area. They became full time RV’ers in 2008 and have a lot of great stories to tell. It was great seeing them!

We arrived in Lake Havasu City on a Thursday afternoon and quickly established a routine I hope will be repeated many times in the future. After visiting the local Bureau of Land Management field office to update our maps, we promptly found a local craft brewery. Shout out to College Street Brewhouse & Pub for some great beer and a great happy hour food menu. Having researched the best dispersed (free!) camping in the area, we headed for The Steps and set about finding a suitable spot. Currently, our vans leveling system consists of placing a small level tool on the kitchen counter with Amy Jo watching as I creep the van around the campsite. Not ideal!

The hiking around Lake Havasu is really great. We highly recommend SARA Park for its variety of hiking trails and easy access at the south end of Lake Havasu City. We hiked the SARA Crack Trail on Friday and really enjoyed the slot canyon and views of the lake.

We hiked the Pilot Rock Trail at SARA Park on Saturday, a longer trail with rolling terrain, sweeping views and a BLM campsite at the lakeshore used mostly by boaters. Be advised! SARA Park has a labyrinth of trails, some well marked, some not so well marked. I took photos of the trailhead map before leaving and we still made a couple of wrong turns, adding some extra distance.

Serendipitously, Lake Havasu City held its annual Winterfest this weekend. We checked it out and found several blocks of the city’s Main St closed off with a few hundered vendor tents, bars and restaurants, etc. We opted for happy hour at College Street Brewhouse and Pub again……it was that good! We would definitely recommend Lake Havasu City for a visit based on the recreational opportunities; hiking, boating, RVing, off road riding. Definitely an active area!

All in all, it was an overwhelmingly successful trip. The van performed really well. The hiking was great. Campsites were easy to find. And we are both still alive!

The Third Third

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