By Cecil Scaglione

Phoenix AZ— You can relax like royalty here on an RV budget.
Lounging by the pool with cool umbrella-shaded drinks under the warm desert sun or lobbing tennis balls across the court doesn’t have to be a luxury you can’t afford. You can enjoy such
high-end activities and attractions for about the cost of a household-name chain motel. And you’ll still have the same safety and security of that offered at the most expense accommodations in the Valley of the Sun. It’s all available at a recreation-vehicle mobile-home park.
While visiting Phoenix over the years for everything from gatherings with friends to marking marital milestones to cavorting with grandchildren, we’ve stayed at such top-of-the-line spas as the Phoenician and family-budget-designed motel suites as well as with family and friends.
For a recent visit we chose a week at a mobile-home park.
For a few pennies more than $100 a night, we enjoyed a home away from home with amenities similar to those offered at the posh Phoenician tucked into the side of Phoenix’s iconic Saddleback Mountain.
While there are several such properties to query, we settled on Val Vista Village RV Resort that offers almost 1,000 units in Mesa at the southeastern tip of Phoenix proper.
Our first reaction was a sense of relief knowing that there were security gates at every entrance to the property. We parked our car right outside the door of our mobile-home unit. We had our own
kitchen, living room, television sets and telephones in bedroom and living room, and wireless access to the Internet. And an identity badge that served as our passport to any area on the grounds and activity on the program.
On our first morning, we trundled over to the activities center in the administration building and listened to immediately available activities. Even if had taken a pen to write some of them down,
we wouldn’t have been able to make a list because we were busy noshing on the coffee and doughnuts lining the wall.
A few of the things that stuck to memory included bus trips to Grand Canyon, casino outings, pancake breakfast, and country music jam.
To see what we wanted to do, we checked out the library, billiard room, athletic club, courts for tennis, basketball, shuffleboard and pickle ball, batting cage, golf driving range, swimming pools
(five of them with four spas), and horseshoe pitch. A group waved us in to fill out a bocce team, mercifully making a choice for us.
During our stay, we had the opportunity to attach ourselves to biking and hiking clubs, pop into a quilting class or session of card games, have our blood pressure tested, do our laundry, test our
talents at karaoka and line dancing, and on and on.
As our neighbors for the week, Joe and Edith Brown from Kitchener, Ontario, who were booked for the winter, pointed out, “With all that’s going on, if you get bored here, there’s no one to blame but yourself.”
All this with plenty of towels for $625 a week, plus tax, compared with resort rates beginning around $400 a day, plus tax and a daily $30+ “service charge.”

About Cecil Scaglione: Cecil is a former San Diego Union-Tribune writer and for a number of years has been a world traveler and writer and currently a syndicated columnist.