Wild Horses

We are at the Wild Horse Pass casino, south of Phoenix (map), a place we've stayed previously, with great success.

This visit was somewhat less so. Since we had dinner last night at our restaurant in Phoenix, we did not take advantage of the dinner opportunity here, and breakfast was over by the time we stumbled in this morning. Also, since we already had players' cards from the last visit, the cash compensation would not be forthcoming.

The other problem, on this visit, is that it is a holiday weekend in high RV season. The "Truck and RV" parking area was completely full, and we came over here to the "RV ghetto" on the other side of the lot.



And, in this case, ghetto is a less tongue-in-cheek term: the casino apparently enforces no stay limit of any kind, nor is there any attention paid to the "usual etiquette" of overnight parking lot stays. Many rigs appear to have "set up camp," with BBQ's, chimineas, patio furniture, etc., using as many as a dozen parking spaces.





What has made this stay particularly miserable for us (and shame on me for not just moving the coach when this became an issue), was this generator outside a rig just a dozen yards from us:



This is a "contractor" style generator, made to run at construction job sites and other places where it will not disturb anyone. And yes, I understand that some RVers are on very tight budgets, and these generators can be a good value -- if you and your neighbors are willing to put up with the noise.

Between our arrival around 9pm and this writing at 2:30, this unit has been running for, conservatively, ten hours. It ran until around 11 or so last night, and was already running by 8:30 or so this morning when I first noticed it. It's still running now, although it was off for less than an hour earlier.

So here we now have the worst of both worlds: we are in what has become, de facto, a campground, with close-in neighbors, yet, unlike a real campground, there is no host or ranger to enforce any kind of rules about when you can run your generator or how loud it (or your stereo) can be.

Normally on a high-season holiday weekend, we would just hunker down right where we are until Monday. But this is a bit beyond the pale, between the generator and the parking lot lighting. So in a few minutes, we will move another 20 miles or so down the road to, umm, a different casino. Perhaps that one, being somewhat further from the greater Phoenix area, will be a bit more subdued.