Blooms in the desert

In California this would be a Poppy, here it has another name

A blue flower

A tree busting out with red flowers

Another blue flower

Blue and orange flowers

A wash that almost cleaned me out

Today was one of those quiet days that probably doesn’t deserve a post, but something happened in the laundry that at least required a note.

On one of our previous trips (San Antonio, I believe) Joan was doing laundry and I noticed when she returned I was missing about six sets of my undershorts. It turned out she had left a dryer full of MY clothes back at the Laundromat. It has been a running joke since any time she does the laundry.

So this morning Joan was doing laundry and when she was ready to move the wet laundry from the three machines to the dryers she noticed that one of the washers she was using was empty of clothes.

Fortunately she saw a man leaving the laundry with his arms full of clothes – my wet clothes – and Joan just caught the man as he was leaving with not just my wet clothes but a washer full of someone else’s clothes as well.

Turned out the man was doing his laundry (this is a good example of why men should never do laundry) and was going to take them home to hang them out instead of drying them. He apparently got distracted by a conversation with someone else in the laundry and then just gathered up what he thought was his clothes and started to walk out.

Joan, ever vigilant about not losing my clothes again, saved the day.

I spent part of the day working on arrangements for the trailer when our time comes to an end her next month and I also went downtown to buy tickets for “Wicked” which is playing at the Tucson Music Hall this month.

We had grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for dinner. Temperatures are expected to moderate over the next few days falling back into the 70s. Bible study is tomorrow morning.

A wonderful week ends in a flash

The KB2FME Trio

And just like that a great week is over. Last Wednesday we welcomed Joan’s two sisters and a brother-in-law and what seems like a snap of the fingers it was time to take them to Tucson International Airport and put them on flights back to the frozen north.

I’m already missing my brother-in-law Denny and will miss him even more when I head off to the fitness center to work out alone tomorrow. As much as Joan and I love our togetherness, it is always fun when we have visitors so we can play host.

On Monday, we headed to the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum for a fun day of looking at the flora, fauna, birds and critters of the desert. It was pretty warm (but it’s a dry heat) but we spent about four hours touring the museum and Joan and I got our first glimpse at the new aquarium at the museum.

Harris Hawks - stars of the show

One of our favorite shows is the “Raptor Free Flight” show at the museum which includes flight demonstrations by live raptors without any tethers or other restrictions attached to them.

Obviously, the birds have been well trained, but the birds fly back and forth to trainers and right over your head during the show. At one point one of the four Harris Hawks flying around flew between Denny and my head so close you could feel the rush of air as it passed by.

When Joan and I went to the museum a couple weeks ago we were unable to see most of the live animal exhibits, it being even hotter that day than this one. This visit we spotted four Javelinas, a grey fox, a bobcat, a white tailed deer, a beer, but like last time we still didn’t see the coyote that apparently has a very good hiding place.

The bear we missed last time

Virtually every type of vegetation you might see in the desert is on exhibit at the museum and I know that our family enjoyed the museum just as much as we did.

A few of the family (not me) remembered to bring along their KB2FME t-shirts and Monday was the day they wore them. In case you’ve forgotten the shirts are a tribute to my father-in-law Red who was a dedicated Ham Radio operator and the KB2FME was his call sign.

Denny had to explain the significance of the shirts to at least one stranger, which is actually a low number based on previous experience.

The Javelina we missed last time

After the museum tour we headed home for a few minutes so we could check our mail and thankfully a couple prescriptions Joan and I have been waiting for a long time finally showed up in our box.

About 5 p.m. we headed to the Texas Roadhouse restaurant in Tucson for our final family meal on this trip and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.  Back home we watched a couple television shows and turned in about 10 p.m. as Patty’s flight out in the morning was an early one.

At 5:15 a.m. Patty and I snuck out of the trailer and headed to Tucson International Airport for her flight.

The birds flew right over our heads

Back at the trailer Denny and I decided to spend his last few hours in Tucson visiting the nearby Pima Air and Space Museum, which included a tour of the “boneyard” the resting place of about 4,000 retired or obsolete military aircraft.

We toured some of the indoor and outdoor exhibits at the museum and then headed back to the trailer about noon. The girls had picked up the trailer, packed the suitcases and we had lunch and then headed to the airport for a sad goodbye to our wonderful week together.

In the way of a recap, we visited Tombstone, saw a re-enactment of the “Shootout at the OK Corral,” visited the legendary “Boothill Cemetery,” the copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, a quick overnight trip to the Grand Canyon which included dinner in Williams, Arizona, the last stop on the old Route 66, went to our church on Sunday, toured the eastern portion of Saguaro National Park and then all the activities outlined here for the past two days.

Denny checking out the "boneyard"

Tonight Joan and I had one of my favorite meals  –  a “CORE” dinner, which stands for Clean Out the Refrigerator – so now Joan has a little more room in the fridge, while I have a little less room in my belly.

Not sure how much posting will happen in the next few days, but check back and see. If you want to see more photos from our recent adventures, just scroll down.

More family fun photos

Western Screech Owl

Enjoying the desert view

White tail deer

Desert Loop Trail at the museum

Lunch at the museum

Barn owl close-up

Joan and Diane enjoying the bird show

Fish.

Pima boneyard in Tucson

A C-117 painted as an eagle and artwork

More photos from our weekend

The sisters at the Boothill Graveyard

Denny at the graves of the three OK Corral victims

Doc Holliday a little drunk

Joan and Patty in Bisbee

A former copper mine in Bisbee

The sign near out picnic table on the way to the Grand Canyon

The sisters with Elvis in Williams, Arizona

Our Grand Canyon Inn hotel

Grand Canyon

More canyon

The sisters at the rim

Could be a postcard, no?

Or a jig saw puzzle?

Near Sedona, Arizona

More Sedona photos

Diane taking a Saguaro photo

Denny the "Rock"

A weekend of laughs, fun and beautiful vistas

The sisters at the infamous graveyard

This may end up being a very long post. I’m going to break it into chapters so that it will make a little more sense, but the bottom line is that we have been having a great time with my sister-in-law Diane and her husband Denny and my other sister-in-law Patty since they arrived her Wednesday night.

Diane and Denny flew in from Baltimore about two hours after Patty arrived from Buffalo, New York on Wednesday night. We laughed a bit but they were tired from a long day of traveling and we turned in pretty much as soon as they arrived back at the trailer.

On Thursday, with temperatures predicted to rise to the high 80s, we changed up our plans to take full advantage of the lower temperatures in the higher elevations and we headed to Tombstone and Bisbee Arizona which are both located in the high desert south of Tucson with temperatures about 10 degrees cooler than in Tucson.


The famous shootout



Our first stop was at the legendary Boothill Cemetery outside Tombstone, a place that Joan and I have traveled past but never stopped until Thursday.  The admission is free and the cemetery is an interesting mix of tragedy and sadness and a little humor. “Here lies Lester Moore, shot four times with a .44. No Les, No More.”

We also stopped at the graves of the three men shot and killed by the Earp (OK, Doc Holliday was there too) brothers in the famous “Shootout at the OK Corral.” We spent about a half hour touring the graveyard and then headed to the famous, or infamous downtown historic Tombstone.

Our trolley tour in Bisbee

And although Joan and I have seen the “Shootout” before we went again with our visitors and enjoyed the re-enactment of the famous gunfight on almost the exact spot where it happened so many years ago.

The sun was hot, but we were able to sit in the shade for the shootout. After that we piled back into the Tahoe and headed a little further south to Bisbee, Arizona, which is a famous old copper mining town just five miles north of the Mexican border.

The scenery to and from Bisbee (and Tombstone) is awe-inspiring and so different from what we are used to back east.

Bisbee, Arizona

In Bisbee we arrived just in time to miss the last Queen Mine tour of the day so we headed downtown Bisbee only to find out that the copper mining museum was set to close in 25 minutes so we hustled across the street to see if we could take a short trolley tour at 4 p.m.

They were also getting ready to shut down for the day, but when they found out there were five of us and then another family showed up they agreed to take us on a tour of the town. Our tour guide was very informative and we appreciated him firing up the trolley and giving us a tour after so many other things had fallen through in town.

When the tour was over we drove a short distance to look down in the 800-foot pit that had once yielded a fortune in copper and then headed north back to the trailer. It took us about 90 minutes to get home, but we arrived in time to find and look at for one last time the Comet Pan-STARRS.

We ate our home cooked meal outside in the dark on the picnic table and then turned in early for our early start to the Grand Canyon on Friday.

Friday, April 15, 2013

Denny and I were up early and went to the fitness center for a good workout before getting cleaned up for our trip north.

Denny poses with staff and owner of Star Touring and Riding

The trip from Tucson to Grand Canyon is about a five hour drive, but we had already decided to stop and visit a family motorcycle association that Denny belongs to which is headquartered in Tucson.

On our way and we stopped at the headquarters office about 10:30 a.m. and Denny was able to meet with the owner and his wife and the small group of employees who run the Star Touring and Riding Association. He was also able to buy a new hat and some patches and the owner gave me a hat pin thanking me for my military service.

The sisters stayed in the car while we got the short tour of the office and after taking some photos we headed back on the road for the rest of our trip.

Lunch on the road

On the way to the Grand Canyon we passed through Casa Grande, Phoenix, Flagstaff and Williams, Arizona. We stopped in Williams for dinner and a little sightseeing and Denny found a leather vest to sew his new patches on.

Dinner was great and we headed on up the road to Valle, Arizona and we checked into the Grand Canyon Inn about 6:30 p.m. and got some rest in preparation for the next day’s adventure at the Grand Canyon.

Denny was a little under the weather and we turned in early.

Our dinner stop the night before

In the morning we were up and out about 9:30 p.m. and arrived at the Grand Canyon about 10 a.m. We started our trip at the main visitor center where we watched a great Grand Canyon video and then headed out to the rim for the first look at the canyon for Diane and Denny.

I always find my first glance into the canyon awe-inspiring and it is a place that never gets old to me.

We lingered at Mather Point for a while and then stopped at two other view points along the South Rim.

At the last one – Desert View Watchtower – we enjoyed the outstanding views of the river and canyon and then had lunch on a picnic table at the site. We were fortunate to see two elks enjoying a quiet snooze in the shade.

One of the many great views of the canyon

At this point we had one of the funniest moments of our trip. When we returned to see the elk we saw a female park ranger standing guard on the sidewalk. We started to talk to her and she said they had called her from the visitor center because a number of folks were menacing the elk and a couple parents had even tried to put their children on the back of a wild elk.

“They think this is like the zoo,” she told us. We exchanged law enforcement talk and how stupid people can be and the lack of common sense and were preparing to leave when my sister-in-law Diane had a sudden urge to confess.

For whatever reason possessed her Diane told the ranger that she felt badly about feeding gum drops to a raccoon at Stony Brook State Park in Dansville, New York some 45 years ago. The ranger looked a little stunned at this sudden express of guilt, but assured Diane that the crime was probably well past the statute of limitations.

Our elk buddy

We were all laughing so hard and I turned to the ranger and told her to make sure she wrote down that conversation for her “book.”  She made a writing motion with her hand. We could only imagine the discussion she had with whoever she lives with that night when she got home from work.

Someday when a ranger tells her that some guy confessed to a murder she can pull out her story about the confession she got at the Desert View Watchtower from a woman who felt a pang of guilt 45 years later about feeding gum drops to a raccoon.

We laughed for more than an hour about the gum drops story.

About 2:30 p.m. we left the park and headed south to Sedona where we planned to have dinner.

Diane and Denny at the park entrance

Avoiding the main highway, I-17, we took the back road US 89A, which is a two lane, windy road through some of the prettiest country in Arizona on the way to Sedona.

What we (I) didn’t know was that Sedona was having a St. Patrick’s Day Parade almost the same time as we were approaching the main drag coming into the town. About a mile north of Sedona we hit a long line of traffic and a police digital sign asking us to be patient and it took nearly 45 minutes to travel the last mile into Sedona.

We arrived just as the parade ended and found a small barbeque place for dinner. It was good and got us back on the road to head south to Tucson.

Downtown Sedona

On the way home we listened to Cousin Brucie on the XM radio and sang along with the oldie, but goody songs that he played.

Unfortunately our traffic issues were not yet over as the traffic on I-10 just north of Tucson narrowed from three lanes to one causing another long traffic jam at a time when I was about gassed from an all-day drive.

We arrived home about 10:10 p.m. after a long, but fun day. We were quickly to bed and asleep.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Things began to stir early and Denny beat me to the fitness center, but I joined him when he was about ½-mile ahead of me on the treadmill. With church at 9:40 a.m. we had to cut the work out a little short to get back and get cleaned up.

The sisters at Saguaro National Park

Church was good and then we gave Diane and Patty a quick tour of some of the activities at the resort and then headed back to the trailer to get dressed for our more casual afternoon activities.

After changing into casual clothes we headed off for a tour of Saguaro National Park.

The park is about 12 miles from the resort and has an 8-mile loop drive that goes through some of the prettiest desert landscape around here.

Following the drive I took Denny, Diane and Patty on a quick outside tour of the aircraft “boneyard” at the Pima Air Base near us.

The sisters and a very tall Saguaro

We arrived back at the trailer about 4 p.m. and Joan and the sisters made a nice chicken dinner on the grill.

We had birthday cake to celebrate the birthdays of all three sisters because their birthdays are bunched in February and March.

Then we spent part of the evening introducing our guests to our new favorite show – “Duck Dynasty.”

I had planned to put some more photos below, but the computer was being stubborn tonight so if I get a chance tomorrow and the computer is being more cooperative I'll add some more photos above this post.

Until then, adios.