Y'all oughta come to Yuma!

I think all of the people in British Columbia, half of Alberta and most of Oregon have relocated in Yuma! We decided to come here after a snowy day in Tuscon.

 These had to be the biggest snowflakes that I'd ever seen!

The snow wasn't really that bad but because we'd been planning to move anyway we had to do some figuring. We had planned to head for a Roper Lake State Park, farther east and at a higher elevation and then go to Roosevelt Lake, farther north and at a still higher elevation but, when the snow came we check long term weather guesses, we decided to head towards the sun and that meant Yuma.,

With the help of our Passport America 1/2 price camping directory we selected Southern Mesa RV Park

Yuma has been a surprising place. There's still a lot of cactus but lots of palms as well. I'm loving the bougainvillea that is blooming everywhere.

 This is a huge agricultural area with grapefruit, tangelo, lemon and orange orchards, date plantations, huge fields of lettuce (it's the salad capital of the world), asparagus, & broccoli. Someone told me that they have three annual harvests of the lettuce. Most seems to be flood irrigated.

Many fellow travelers have recommended seeing the Yuma Territorial Prison so we did.

Built in 1875 by the prisoners who had to live there it was outgrown and closed in 1909. After that it housed the Yuma High School! It was unbelievably harsh; the prisoners called it the Hell Hole of Arizona but the people of Yuma called it the Country Club because it had more amenities than their homes did - running water and electricity and a big library. The warden's wife, who started the library, repulsed a prisoner outbreak by grabbing the Gatling Gun in the guard tower after the guard was killed and shooting at the rioting prisoners. She must have been quite a gal.

We're enjoying the sunshine again but I have to move away from the computer. More adventures later.

Go home, Oregonian!

We arrived in Yuma Wednesday at Southern Mesa RV Park about 3 miles as the crow flies from Mexico. Blue skies, warm temperatures and a couple of old classmates of Dick's all welcomed us but yesterday they changed their tune: did you bring this weather with you! It was rainy and cold all day. Today, though, we're back to what we'd like to consider our new normal - sunny and in the 70's.

Yuma's a surprise to us - palm trees, lemon groves, lettuce, broccoli and asparagus fields.We bought a sack of 10 grapefruit for $2 from a roadside stand and I treated myself to a date shake, the first ever. We going to ease into the warm here for a while.

I'll post some pictures when I get a chance.

Happy Valentine's Day

My Valentine bought me a new laptop to replace my little notebook which was way too small and slow so to reciprocate, I made him our traditional Valentine's dinner - heart-shaped meatloaf and baked potatoes. I'm checking out the ease of loading pictures on by blog. Hope you enjoy.

Lisa and the boys picked up us at the airport two weeks ago. We had to stop for a photo of Alex and Mater just across from the falls in Oregon City on 99E.

 It was so good to see family and friends. It had only been a month but both Alex and especially Mark had really grown.

Sorry, Mark about the red eye. The program for that is on the computer at home.

Dick, Betty and Bill - a family reunion at a hard time, the passing of Bill's wife Bev. We were glad that we could come home.

We had left our trailer at an RV Park in Catalina, AZ, NE of Tuscon. We flew the milk run both ways and just needed to hang out here when we got back and get some of this lovely AZ sunshine back in our bones. Here's a picture of Dick making brownies when we got back.

I saw this roadrunner - not running on a road, but running along the top of a wall - one day as we were getting fuel.  I was thrilled to get a picture of a cardinal in Sabino Canyon. Can you see him?

We really haven't seen too much wildlife.Maybe they go south for the winter too! But what we have seen has been pretty interesting: A coyote walking through the state park just behind our trailer, some antelope yesterday outside of Tombstone, burros up in Oatman. There's a couple of cottontails living in our RV park.

We're totally loving the desert around Tuscon. It's lush with cacti. Here's a picture of the mountain Jim and Sharon Maben (Patsy Kozera's brother) call their mountain from the Ironwood National Park

 

These are the beautiful Catalina Mountains that we can see from our campground.

Here's a barrel cactus blooming under what is called a nurse tree. The nurse trees protect the cactus and they grow up through them. It's cool.

Saguaros are everywhere - on the license plates, the median strips, everyone's front yard or back yard or both. They stand up so majestically and march to the tops of the mountainsides. And, don't you love that blue, blue sky?

By for now. 

Watch your back!

As I was taking pictures of the Lavender Pit Mine just south of Bisbee, Arizona yesterday, I noticed a man talking to Dick. He appeared out of nowhere and introduced himself as a Chiricahua Apache related to Geronimo who did art work and had some silver bracelets for sale. (Kind of like the Rolex guy with watches up his arm!) Dick's immune to that kind of salesmanship even with the provenance.

This huge pit is what is left after 380 million tons of copper ore were removed.

Although we were too late for the reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone I did get a picture of one of the leading citizens:

It was really windy yesterday but it's calm today and sunny again. Wish you were here too!

Sunny Saturday

We parked our trailer at Wishing Well RV Park in the town of Catalina, a suburb of Tuscon before we made our flying trip home. Plan A was to finish out the week here and move farther east but we've heard reports of snow and are thinking seriously about sacrificing the $5 deposit required to book a place at Roper Lake State Park [http://azstateparks.com/parks/rola/gallery.html] and stay put here in the sunshine!

We scrounged enough quarters to wash all 4 loads of laundry but didn't have enough for the dryer, so we took advantage of all our sun and hung everything out to dry. Haven't done that for a long while. Waiting for the clothes to dry I took a stroll and got a picture of this interesting tree/bush at the gate to the park:

 I don't know if that's a giant yucca or what, also some sort of palm and cactus in the picture.

I've picked up some turquoise jewelry and some turquoise from a lady who has her own mine in Nevada:

Dick found a guy who had some rattlesnake skin belt buckles that he liked:

It was good to be home for a week but also good to be back. Speaking of back - Dick's back is responding pretty well to the dry & warm as opposed to the wet and cold. Praise the Lord!!

On-line again, for a while.

The Arizona State Park System have implemented a new system of on-line reservations. Unfortunately they do not provide internet connections to do it with so we've hung out at the local library. Yesterday we moved from Catalina State Park to Wishing Well RV Park only 5 miles north but with the same dramatic view of the Catalina Mountains outside Tuscon.

It's shorts & t shirt weather most days, a couple have been overcast but the majority of time it has been in the high 60's by 10:00 and a few 70+ degree days. We sat outside yesterday at a campground pizza party and got sunburned.

We love the Tuscon area. I was thrilled to see some barrel cactus blooming when we pulled up to Catalina State Park.

We've learned a few things:

Don't make friends with a cholla. Here's a close up.

What I thought were birdnests in the trees are, in fact, desert mistletoe which provides berries for the birds to eat.

The sunsets are beautiful but . . .

praise the Lord for a good heater. The nights are chilly - low thirties most nights. Once the sun goes down - I mean immediately upon sunset - it cools off. It's the desert.

 We love the saguaros - the symbol of Arizona. I took these pictures on a walk we took from our campground.

They don't branch until they're 70 years old!

We have had a change of plans. Bev Large, Dick's brother Bill's wife has gone to glory, as they used to say, and passed from this life to the next Saturday morning after a long bout with that C demon. We've moved our trailer to an RV park where we can store it for a week and are flying home tomorrow.

It's Monday, I think

We tried geocaching the other day. We downloaded some coordinates that we found to established caches  and went out exploring the country. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and will do it again, however, our learning curve on this new venture looks like this:

The people camped next door to us were from British Columbia and when we struck up a conversation with them it turned out that they were avid geocachers. We were aware of this sport and decided after talking with them that we'd give it a try. They were leaving or they'd have given us some help.

The idea is that a person goes to geocaching.com, locates caches near their location, enters the coordinates into a GPS and proceeds to locate a cache at the coordinates that has been hidden by someone. Usually there's a logbook to record your find.

It took us about 2 hours to figure out how to use the GPS. This RV park is not posted as a 55+ park but there were no technologically advanced young people around to lend a hand.

Then we struck out on foot. I read the part about the cache being 1.1 miles from our camp but Dick's GPS  didn't clarify distances like that so he just started off across the restricted area of desert adjacent to our camp with me following blithely behind holding my sunglasses and the instruction manual wishing I had remembered emergency rations or at least a water bottle. Occasionally I'd look back over my shoulder to make sure the trailer was still visible. (I'm big on line-of-sight) Finally I encouraged him to take his eye off the GPS screen and look around and we headed back to camp, about a quarter of a mile away, hopped in the truck and took off down the road.

We got close to the area we were looking for and saw another car parked there with people milling around. We were excited because we thought we'd be able to get some help on the geocache but it turned out they were looking for a location their Grandpa had taken them to years ago. Reading between the lines I think they might have been looking for a good place to scatter Grandpa's ashes. Hopefully they'll put the coordinates into their GPS and be able to find the spot again. We got close on our cache, enjoyed hiking a little, found a wide assortment of broken bottles and unique rocks but no cache.

Our second try took us through the town of Salome (the town sign reads where she danced, but we pronounced it sa-LOAM not like Herod's step-daughter) out a paved road, onto a dirt road, up a gravel road where I shifted into 4WD and up a short mountain. The cache was called Nuts over Salome because it was hidden in a plastic Kirkland nut jar and overlooked the valley. The view was beautiful, the walk was enjoyable, I got some more pictures, but unfortunately the heavens didn't open and a ray of light expose the cache and it remained hidden from out view.

[Please turn your computer to the side to look at this picture.]
When we got back to camp I took a look at the Geocaching  book to find out a little more about our new sport. The book says that GPSs are accurate to about 50 feet. That doesn't sound like much when you are looking for Wal-Mart or a Dairy Queen but a nut jar or a baby food jar? Give me a break. We did have lots of fun and saw some interesting country. We're going to try it again at our next campsite, Liberty Haven Ranch between Wickenburg, named for the guy who found the Vulture Mine, and Phoenix.

Later, Lynn and Dick

PS The Geocache book said that the first established cache was in the Beavercreek area! How about that!

PPS We found this sweet little roadside chapel: