Winter getaway wraps up with many friends

Life and time in the desert spins out of control like one of those clocks in an old fashioned movie. It seems like we just got here and now we are in the final throes of cleaning out the refrigerator, cleaning out closets in the trailer and packing for the trip home.

As I write this (March 29) we spent the day checking our closets for stuff that has to go and for the stuff that will stay put in the trailer after we store it Saturday morning in Flagstaff. This year, more than others, we put some extra time and money into trailer maintenance and just today we ran into a new issue. Two mornings in a row we woke up to a pool of water on the kitchen floor. The first morning we passed it off as a water bottle that may have leaked, but when it happened again we realized we had a more serious problem. So down on the floor I went and discovered that our 15-year-old water heater has sprung a fatal leak.

There is no time or ability to replace it in two days, so we bypassed the water heater, shut it off, drained it and will deal with it when we return next year. For the time being we are boiling water to wash dishes, so just like real camping. It’s just for two more days so we’ll struggle through. We had all the trailer decals replaced and the outside of the rig detailed and it looks practically new even though it had started to show some of its 15 years outside. When I last wrote (I know it has been more than a month) we had just attended a Tucson Roadrunners hockey game and were getting ready for the Michigan Party on Monday, Feb. 21. We had a lower than normal turnout but still 38 of our fellow Michiganders showed up to celebrate all that is the Mitten State.

On Wednesday, February 23 Mr. Boogie Woogie performed in Bourbon Street Bash and it was a raucous but wonderful show that left our toes tapping and our hands clapping. The shows here this year have been simply wonderful. More on those later. As I love to do I have continued to hike at least 2 times a week and sometimes a third. I’ve done Ventana Canyon, Wasson Peak, Chiricahua Mountains, Phoneline (which turned into a 9-mie slog in 85-degree heat), Gabe Zimmerman, Cactus Forest Trail in East Saguaro National Park and a couple others. I also had a memorable day hiking with my friend Bob from Lapeer. On Thursday, February 24, Bob and I headed out so we could hike to Ft. Bowie in southeast Arizona. It’s not a difficult hike, but it gets a lot harder when you have to do a third of it over because you dropped your cellphone on the trail. Yes, that’s right, I lost my cellphone on one of the more difficult parts of the return trail.

I noticed it was gone when I reached for it in my pocket to take a photo of the fort from the top of the hill overlooking it. When we couldn’t find it, Bob headed one direction and I headed back in the direction I came from to see if I could find it. I was on my way down a fairly steep hill (which I had just climbed up) and looked ahead about ¼-mile and saw a couple holding something in their hand. When I was close enough to yell at them they immediately held up my phone and said they were in the process of trying to unlock it so they check my phone logs and try to call someone who would know who it belonged to. Thankfully, they were honest and caring and my panic over losing my phone and all that it contains subsided. I still had added about a mile to the hike.

Ft. Bowie is famous because it is the location where the Apache Wars started back in the 1800s. There remains a small post cemetery than includes the remains of a number of Native Americans, including a son of Geronimo a few farmers, but all the soldiers who were buried there were moved a long time ago to a national cemeteries elsewhere. I’ve read two books on the Apache Wars and it was moving to see the actual locations where many of the events in the books occurred. OK, back to other activities, Joan and I attended most, but not all the Thursday lectures. Joan attended the one by a local DEA agent on opioid abuse and I attended one on electric vehicles. Because of Covid restrictions only four lectures were held this year.

Both Joan and I continued to attend the separate mens’ and womens’ Bible studies and last Thursday I completed the 12-week study that I led on Thursday nights that centered on the lives of the 12 Disciples. I had a great group of 24 people who attended by Thursday studies and I learned more from them than I’m sure they learned from me. We’ve attended dances almost every weekend, including a new group called RAW, which is the remnants of one of our favorite groups, Retro Rockets. Since I last wrote we attended another Reminiscence Dance, which is a group made up of musicians who live at our resort.

DJ Delores, another resort resident hosts a monthly dance with recorded music. At most of the dances we joined with our friends Mike and Sue and Joe and Sharon, although Joe and Sharon left the park early to begin more of their retirement travels. We did get a chance to introduce Joe and Sharon to Monday Night at Maynard’s and we are hoping they will return here in a future year.

The other concerts we attended were Walkin’ the Line, a Johnny Cash tribute; One of These Nights, an excellent Eagles tribute band, Surfin’, a Beach Boys tribute and finally Woodstock, a show that we previously saw on February 7 with our friends Bob and Karen. They left the park at the end of February. On March 15, we skipped our usual Tuesday night potluck dinner and went to the Gaslight Theater again this time to see “Arizona Smith” which was a spoof of Indiana Jones. Lots of great music and laughs with good friends. We’re going to do more of the Gaslight offerings in the future.

We have been blessed this year with the company of great friends from Michigan. Roger and Jessica who have stopped and stayed the last few years, made a point of staying in the resort in their RV for about 10 days. It’s all the time they had this year as they made a detour to Hawaii which ate into the time they usually spend with us. Can’t blame them for choosing Hawaii though. Roger was my first editor at the Flint Journal and he has been a great friend. While Roger and Jessica were here another former colleague, Jane, and her husband, Chuck, joined the four of us for dinner at “Sauce” one of our favorite places to eat. Roger also knows Jane, who was a photographer at the Journal.

Jane and Chuck also joined us for the Wednesday night “Woodstock” concert at the resort on March 23 and dinner before hand at Fat Willy’s here at the resort. It is fun to share our time here with people we know from back home. Another visitor was George Overman. George and I both served on the USS Cogswell DD-651, but not at the same time. We have become friends through the ship association that we both serve on. He was in town for the Family Motor Coach Association rally at the Pima Fairgrounds. He also visited us at the resort for dinner. It was great to have George here as well.

Joan has continued to attend and enjoy her polymer clay classes on Friday afternoon. She recruited her friend Suzy, who is now a frequent attendee as well. She continues to enjoy her Zumba classes two times a week and her aquacise classes which are also two times a week. And when Joan isn’t doing all that she is volunteering as a receptionist at the medical clinic here at the resort. The nurse practitioner who runs the clinic takes her volunteers out to lunch each month and Joan enjoys those get togethers as well. Joan was also honored at the March birthdays party at our friends’ Darcel and Barry’s house in the Cove. Everyone sang the birthday song, but mostly we got cake and ice cream.

As for me I am in my 8th year of volunteering on the table and chairs team, which is more intense that it may sound. We set up 625 chairs every Wednesday night for the concerts, 300 chairs every Sunday for chapel, dozens of tables every Saturday for coffee and donuts in the ballroom, not to mention tables and chairs for the dances and other gatherings. Our table and chair leader is Carl, a retired airline pilot, who is a joy to work with. There was another Market Daze and finally this past weekend, Joan, me, Roger and Jessica did our annual wine tasting tour through the Sonoita region just south of here. I’m the designated driver but we had a ball sitting out on the patios and looking at the gorgeous scenery. We ended the evening with a very nice dinner at the Copper Brothel (really!) Restaurant in Sonoita.

There has been one other adventure this past month or so. Joan’s dentist in Michigan warned here in December that she had a crown and tooth that probably would need attention. Joan opted to wait until we returned in April, but the tooth had other ideas. So we began an odyssey to find a dentist who could diagnose and fix her toothache. Eventually we found a good dentist in Tucson who, along with the help of a local Endodontist performed a root canal. The original dentist is installing the new crown on Joan’s birthday, March 31 the day before it’s wheels up for us as we depart our winter paradise. This is the second time we’ve had to have emergency dental work done for Joan here. Finally we have found a doctor/allergist here in Tucson that was willing to give Joan her allergy shots so that has been a good thing this year. One of the big dramas, well one of a couple dramas here this year, involved a stray dog that residents nicknamed “Buddy.” The pit bull mix has been wandering free here since our arrival and survives off the scraps left for him by the residents. A failed attempt to tranquilizer and capture him had folks up in arms, although truly the best thing for this animal would be for him to be caught and given a good new home. The second drama involved a Javelina, a wild pig like (but not actually related to a pig) creature that broke through the floor of a park model and ended up sleeping on the bed after trashing the inside of the trailer. Local sheriff’s deputies chased it out of the park model with a curtain rod and an open front door.