Our Travel Blog

The usual sunny clear start to the day. Temperature climbed up to 29°C by afternoon.

Earlier in the week we visited the Casa Grande Ruins, but forgot the camera. We went back today, with the camera, and got some photos.

Casa Grande (Spanish for Large House) was built around 1350 by the Ancient Sonoran Desert People ( to give them their politically correct title). The house itself was 4 stories high, which was quite an achievement back then, it is built out of a clay like material, and has disintegrated over the years. In 1932 a large roof structure was placed over the house to slow down the deterioration.

Like many older civilisations the sun and moon played a major role in their lives, Casa Grande was built to identify solar and lunar events as shown below.

The  Ancient Sonoran Desert People were also masters of irrigation and had been irrigating nearby land for nearly 1,000 years before Casa Grande was built. There are many smaller ruins surrounding the main house. One hundred years after the Casa Grande was built, the area became uninhabited; no one knows for certain why. Theories range from droughts, floods and aliens!

While we were out we toured around some of the back roads, there were many cacti in the area.

Not all cacti are green!

Although most of the landscape is desert, in this area there are many areas of green fields, which seems out of place. There is a very extensive system of irrigation canals around the area to help keep the land fertile.

We also came across this house on our travels:

Below is a more “normal” house:

On the way
back we passed the local airfield where there was a largish plane that I didn’t recognise. We dove around the airfield trying to get a better view of it, but no luck. I found a picture of it on the internet though:

(reproduce with the permission of John Olafson)

It is a WWII era Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer, which is a Navy version of the B24 Liberator. There is a war-birds and vintage aircraft restoration outfit based at the airfield, and they were doing some work on the aircraft.

Back at the trailer I started working on putting an outdoor Ethernet plug at the back of the trailer. Simple job of drilling a 1″ hole through the fiberglass and wood backing material. Wrong! Some evil worker at the factory knew exactly where I was going to drill and sandwiched a metal plate between the wood and the fiberglass. Wood spade drills  don’t go through metal. Suffice it to say, hammer, screwdriver (used as chisel) and some well chosen words got the problem sorted after a couple of hours.

With all this out the way we got talking to our Ontario neighbours again. The small world started to envelop us again. The wife, Michelle, was vice principal at Osgoode High where our two kids went and she recalls their names. They also know a number of our friends from the Osgoode area, and it is quite likely we have been at the same parties.

Guess what….. Another sunny start to the day! As the day went on it climbed to 28°C. Even this time of year the sun is strong, and shade is welcome. I dread to think what it would be like here in the height of summer.

Lyn headed over to the laundry this morning while I pottered around doing nothing in particular. Once the laundry was complete we headed out to a new chain of food stores for the weekly shop. The prices seemed better than in other States for most things. Talking of prices, diesel fuel is 69¢ Canadian / litre and gas is 46¢.

After lunch we had planned to go back to the Casa Grande Ruins, but neither of us was overly enthusiastic, so we took a vote and decided to put it off a day and stay at the trailer! I started taking inventory of the printer kit that arrived yesterday, might as well catch any missing parts while we are in the US.

Mid afternoon we went for our mile walk around the resort. As we were passing an Ontario registered car I noticed a Geocaching licence plate on it. We stopped to chat and found out that we knew the couple, not directly but through their geocaching exploits. They had recently moved from Barrhaven to Greely, and we of course had moved from Greely to Barrhaven.

Over coffee we revised out trip a little, we will now go to the Southern end of the Grand Canyon for a few days, then onto Las Vegas, Fresno and finally San Francisco.

The same start to the day, and looking ahead at the forecast it shouldn’t change for at least 10 days. Life is so difficult at times! Suffice it to say, this was day 2 for the shorts.

Today was cleanup day, at least for Lyn. The laundry got done, and the trailer got dusted and vacuumed. I went out side to replace the kitchen hood vent, as I took it apart I realised that there was two ways to tackle this; remove the whole unit and then caulk it all back in place, or undo 2 screws, replace just the flap and call it a day. The latter approach won.

Today’s frustration arrived with the mail. I had ordered a 3D Printer kit as my latest “Toy” a couple of weeks ago; well it arrived today, but there’s little I can do with it until I get home. At best I may get to do some painting of the frame. Ah well.

After lunch we took a walk around the resort, and spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around and sitting out in the 27°C sun.

Another boringly (but welcome) sunny with blue skies wake up. Night time temperatures are still around 8°C, but considering we are 1500′ up in the desert that’s no too bad.

We decided it was time for a day out, so the plan was to head up to North of Phoenix to visit a Pioneer town, dating from the late 1800’s. This was well before Arizona became a State. It was the last of the contiguous States and joined the US on Feb 14, 1912.

The town wasn’t bad, but there no people there acting out the part of the towns people, and  the “stores” and “workshops” were not open. Evidently there will be a number of volunteers there tomorrow acting out roles, but there will also be over 500 schoolkids there.

General Landscape Around the Town

Undertakers With Coffins Outside

Cactus

More Cactus

Typical Cabin

Church

Wheelwright

Pumping out Water to Pan for Gold

Ranch House

General Town View

Covered Wagon

Large Saguaro Cactus

The saguaro cactus can live for over 200 years and grow to 60ft in height. These cacti are unique to Arizona, parts of northern Mexico and a few stray ones in California.

After the visit to the town we headed out to the Deer Valley Rock Art Centre. This an area of many large boulders, most of them bearing petroglyphs. A petroglyph is a marking carved into a rock usually using a stone tool. Some of the petroglyphs were made 10,000 years ago. These petroglyphs  were made by American Indian people over a period spanning thousands of years.

Another beautiful day in Arizona! Wake up temperature around 10°C, maxing out at around 25°C this afternoon.

After breakfast I wanted to do a little work on the trailer, for some time I have been meaning to try to block off a hole in the bathroom floor. This hole is where the hot and cold water pipes come up from the basement, When they built the trailer they decided a 2.5″ hole should be just about big enough for 2 half inch pipes to go through. We brought some expanding foam the other day, and today seemed to be a good day to fix it. We needed to tidy out the basement area as it was quite a mess down there, so we pulled everything out for later sorting and that gave me the access I needed to fix the hole.

While this was being done, Lyn decided it was time to do some more sewing….. outside.

Across the road from us are a number of “pickle ball” courts. Pickle ball is a cross between badminton, squash, tennis and racquet ball. It certainly seems popular as there are four courts here, and they seem to in use most of the time.

After lunch we sorted out the basement contents and put them back much tidier than when we took them out.

We headed out for a walk later in the afternoon and dropped by our friends RV for a couple of minutes. About an hour and a bit, and a glass of wine, later we headed back to the trailer! At least we walked nearly 1.5 miles before taking the break.

Tomorrow we are heading out to visit a couple of places on the north side of Phoenix.

No fog this morning, just clear blue skies. Being as we are in the desert the temperatures do tend to drop quickly overnight once the sun goes down. Wake up temperature was around 8°C, peaking at 21°C this afternoon.

After breakfast (the home made variety, NOT the free waffles) Lyn headed over to a craft meeting. I settled down to try and clean out my cupboard area. Some time back I cleared out my “corner” of the trailer, although it made the place far more presentable, it was done so in my usual fashion… find somewhere with door, chuck offending articles in and close door. Well the cupboard is much tidier today, and all articles have a home.

Lyn came back from crafts having signed up for two new activities; glass fusion and metal flower making!

After lunch we headed out to discover the area, we went to the ruins of Casa Grande from where the town gets its name. Unfortunately the camera neglected to come with us. As there were some good views of the desert and cacti, as well as the ruins I’ll put the trip in a later blog. The good news is, the admission to the ruins and museum is good for 7 days, not bad for $5!

It was warm enough this evening to fire up the BBQ for the first time in quite a while.

Another warm day is forecast for tomorrow and the next day and the next ……..

When we woke up this morning we were expecting to see bright sunshine. We were disappointed, there was a thick fog outside. Eventually this burnt off, and the promised sun and blue skies arrived. We got up to around 20°C in the afternoon.

Today, being the first of the month meant that there was a lot of traffic coming and going, this place seems pretty popular. The actual resort is pretty good, being Arizona there is no grass around, the individual sites are deep gravel with a concrete patio. There are a couple of pools and a hot tub. There also a number of games courts and games rooms with pool and table tennis. There are free waffles and OJ every morning, and there is a resident chef who cooks meals most nights. The food situation here could be a problem as far as weight loss is concerned!

The flap in the vent to the range hood decided to die recently, so I spent some time trying to work out what size replacement I need.

After lunch we went for a walk outside the resort, where coincidentally, there were a number of geo-caches close by. 2.5 miles and 5 caches later we were back at the trailer.

One thing thips lace does not have is a picnic table for the patio, luckily we carry our own! We have only used it at one other site, and it has sat in the storage bay for the last couple of years. It is now back in use. We set up our chairs and the BBQ on the patio, then we were all set.

We also met our neighbours, they come from Ottawa… just a couple of miles from us. He was also an Air Traffic Controller!

Back in the trailer I am busy fighting gremlins in the internet setup, one day this set up will work as advertised. Then again, that would be boring!

Well, the rain stopped long enough for us to set up last evening, but returned later on. It continued throughout most of the day before stopping in the late afternoon. We headed out to do some food shopping this morning, many of the roads were flooded which probably made the locals happy as it seems they need the rain.

We just hung around the RV for most of the day. Mid afternoon there was a knock on the door, it was a friend that Lyn had met in Georgia. She’s from BC and is spending her first year at this campground. It seems there may be a lot of crafting and crafting trips taking place over the next four weeks.

The rain finally let up around 4:30, and people started emerging from their RV’s, particularly those with dogs! We took a walk around the resort, and dropped in on a couple from Kemptville that we also met in Georgia. This is probably the most cosmopolitan place we have been in as far as the number of States and Provinces represented.

The forecast for the foreseeable future is wall to wall sunshine with temperatures climbing from 20°C at the beginning of the week to 27°C by next weekend.

Up early (for us) and packed up and on the road by 0830. Although there was some rain overnight it stopped long enough to put the rest of stuff away this morning. The temperature dropped down to 4°C as the morning went on, and we climbed up to 5000 feet crossing the Continental Divide.

A few miles north of where we stayed, the land became more fertile with a lot of dairy farming. Shortly after that the landscape became very flat with dry grass and small bushes growing out of the sand. We could drive and see for miles, but at times there was no sign of any life, animal or human. As we approached the Arizona border, the views became similar to the Scottish Highlands.

There was one area where there numerous large boulders dominating the view, unfortunately the camera wasn’t handy and by the time Lyn got it ready we had almost left the area.

You can even see the trailer in the mirror!

We continued north through Tombstone, with the rain getting heavier and the spray restricting visibility in places.

Eight hours after leaving we arrived at our new home for the next month. Again the rain gods were kind to us and the rain held off while we set up.