Eating meals with friends and family!

We are starting an eating frenzy:

On Tuesday we had dinner at John and Gloria's.  It was good to see them and to see the progress in their new home.  They have a huge back yard and with all the recent rain, the yard is looking beautiful and green!  It is very woodsy!  Guess I need to take a picture!

On Wednesday we met friends Pam and John for dinner at Lupe Tortilla, a Mexican chain restaurant.  It was a beautiful evening and we sat outside on their patio by the rock waterfall.  We got caught up with them, their health and their recent move.  After dinner we went over to their new place.  It is lovely and a nice location.

Yesterday got the oil changed in the truck and then went to Willie's for dinner with John and Gloria.  It is a cute place.  They have lots of garage style window doors that open to a wooded area, very pretty and sort of a diner style.  I had a pulled pork sandwich that was delicious and fortunately, I only ate half!  Why? Because when we were getting ready to leave a waiter walked by with something looking pretty yummy!  When he came back by we found out it was a milkshake.  My evil twin side decided we all needed to have one!  They were really thick and yummy.  I had the really high caloric Reese's pieces shake!  We all managed to devour them!

Today is hair cut day for me, dinner at John and Gloria's and we are going to the see the senior play their granddaughter, Haley, is directing!

Keeping busy in Boerne..."Ain't Life Grand!"

From Tombstone to Boerne

We spent last Thursday in Tombstone.  We saw a gunfight, had lunch, shopped and did the city tour! We had a good time!  The actors in the gunfight show were pretty good and it was comical!  We had a good lunch and I got a nice pair of turquois earrings!

While we were waiting to go on the city tour, this man came up with his parrot.  The parrot was a real ham!  He loved to have his picture taken and to mug for the camera!  He played dead parrot real well!

After we left Tombstone, we visited the souvenir shop that advertises "The Thing".  Turns out to be some sort of mummy from the desert!  But for $1.00 at least we know what "The Thing" is!  They advertise it for miles from each direction on the I-10!  At least they have DQ there and so we had a blizzard for dinner!

On Friday the RV repairman came out and put in new gears for our jack!  We took off to Bisbee, AZ.  We didn't have much time (the repairman was late), but wanted to see what the town looked like.  It is a cute town and we will go back some time.  It was almost 5:00 so everything was closed.

We headed back to Tombstone for dinner and the Tombstone Ghost and Murder Tour!  It was a fun little tour, as they had lots of murders in Tombstone and quite a few ghosts too!  I think the tour guide had me convinced of that!

Saturday morning we left for Boerne.  We stayed just out of El Paso the first night and Ft. Stockton the second night.  At Ft. Stockton we had such a storm.  When I let Max out his last potty break for the night noticed it was really lightning.  About 12:30 we awoke to a huge, loud clap of thunder!  I lived in Ft. Lauderdale where they have lots of thunder and lightning and I don't remember such scary thunder!  It didn't roll at all just bam.  That lasted about 5 minutes and then the huge winds roared through.  About 5 minutes after that the rain poured down on top of us and we even had some hail!  The hard rains lasted bout an hour.  Usually it's just Max that gets nervous with big thunder, but I didn't like it much either!  Needless to say, not  good night's sleep was had by any of us!

Yesterday afternoon we pulled into our campground in the Lakehills area of Texas.  We will be here until the 29th of May.  It started raining early evening last night along with some thunder and lightning and just stopped raining at noon today!  Tonight we are going to John and Gloria's for dinner so hope the rain is done for awhile!

Lots of sightseeing..."Ain't Life Grand!"

Pima Air Museum!

Yesterday we drove back to the Tucson area to go to the Pima Air Museum.  They have over 300 airplanes of all shapes and sizes! They also have a hangar dedicated to space travel.  I am always amazed at how much Ted knows about airplanes, not just the names but specific details about all sorts of planes from so many eras!  We were talking to a couple of volunteers and I think Ted would be a perfect volunteer to an air museum, maybe some day!

I took LOTS of pictures including one of a dust storm.  We were in the 390th Memorial Museum looking at a B-17 Flying Fortress and we heard some loud noises.  We thought the air conditioner was making noise but when I looked up, it looked a little like dust coming in.  We walked to the front to leave the hangar and were shocked at the dust storm!  You could barely open the doors against the wind.  A man came in from the outside and said he was really sand blasted.  The wind slowed down a bit so we took off for another hangar.  We didn't walk around the outside planes too much after that!

Here are some of my pictures!  Sorry the collages have so many pictures, but it gives you a small idea of the scope of the museum!

The "Artists and Airplanes" collage was a section in the museum of airplane noses painted by artists.  The one I'm standing next to is filled with kisses...lips!   Here is a close up of the lips!

Enjoying my husband enjoying the museum..."Ain't Life Grand!"

Kartchner Caverns

Monday morning we drove east to the very small town of St. David. The town is east of Tucson very near Benson. There is a lot of things to see in the area.

Our campground is lovely. It is one of the few desert campgrounds with trees and two small lakes with fish! One gentleman told me he caught a 5lb large mouth bass in the lake. It is catch and release so he's back in the lake to catch another day!

Ted noticed a problem with one of our jacks in the RV.  So rather than wait until it totally breaks on us, we had the repair man out yesterday and he's going to replace the gear mechanism on Friday. That means we will leave here Saturday instead of Friday, but better to get the problem fixed.

After the repairman left we went to the Kartchner Caverns State Park. This "live" cave was discovered in 1974.  In 1967 Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts were cavers and had received a tip about a sink hole. There was no opening yet so they left and returned 7 years later. They found a small hole that a person couldn't even fit through. What they found when they made the hole large enough to squeeze through, was a virgin cave! They kept it a secret for a long time while they worked with the owners of the property (the Kartchners) and the State of Arizona to protect the cave and made it into a state park. There are three parts to the cavern. The Big Room was the first part they discovered and it closes from April 15 to October 15 because there are bats that come back every year to have their babies in the cave! They even reduced the opening in the sink hole back to the way it was, for the bats entry way.  They have a "soda straw" that is over 21 feet long!

We toured the Throne and Rotunda Rooms.  Most of the formations are made of calcium carbonate and take many forms.  Dripping, seeping, flowing, pooling and condensing water create a stunning variety of formations!  Gary and Randy called their discovery, Xanadu and then when the found a massive column over 58 feet tall, they named it Kubla Khan!  It is amazing!  They estimate that they have been forming over 100,000 years but not more than 200,000 years!

There is no picture taking in the caverns so I'm posting a couple of post cards.

Amazing caverns..."Ain't Life Grand!"

Aviation Museum

Yesterday we visited the Commemorative Air Force Aviation Museum. It's a small but impressive museum in Mesa, Arizona. They have a display of beautifully restored planes and a couple of helicopters. They have really done a lot of work gathering history on various topics such as women pilots, Arizona pilots and crews, a timeline on the Doolittle Raid and the crew and so much more.  And, if you've got the money, you can take a ride on a B17, B25, SNJ, C45, Stearman or DC3.  I think Ted enjoyed the museum!

Here are a few of the planes in the museum:

They also had some other things to see in the museum:

This morning we are moving on down the road east of Tucson. We have some sightseeing to do there too!

Sexy airplanes..."Ain't Life Grand!"

Visiting Casa Grande!

After an uneventful drive from Yuma, we arrived in Casa Grande.  It's pretty warm here, mid 90's!

Yesterday we visited the Casa Grande National Monument.  They are ruins left by the HoHokam Indian Tribe.  The ruins became protected in 1892 but there was already damage done to the site, including graffiti.  The Hohokam Indians are considered to be the "First Masters of the American Desert".  They lived in permanent settlements by 300 CE (Common Era) and became villagers around 1150 CE, their Classic Period. This is when they built a central plaza with a "Great House" completed in 1350.  They built along large canals of the Gila River.  They were able to grow crops that withstood desert conditions such as corn, beans, squash, and cotton.  The Classic Period lasted until the 1400s and they are not sure what happened to them after that.

The building material used for their buildings is called caliche.  It is a concrete like mix of sand, clay and calcium carbonate (limestone).  It took 3,000 tons to build the Great House (the ruin under the canopy).  Caliche mud was layered to form walls four feet thick at the base, tapering at the top.  They used hundreds of juniper, pine and fir trees floated 60 miles down the Gila River to anchor the walls and form ceiling and floor support.  The roof was made using Saguaro cactus ribs, layered across beams covered with reeds and topped with caliche mud.  They were amazing architects!  In the bottom 3rd picture from the left, the small hole near the top showed the sun on the day of the summer solstice.   On the other side was one for the equinox.

The desert flowers are so beautiful at this time of year!  The Saguaro Cactus is 50 to 90 years old before they will grow arms!  They can be up to 200 years old!

After we visited the ruins on the east side of Casa Grande, we decided to drive to Maricopa which is on the west side of Casa Grande.  There is a glider port that Ted had flown out of many years ago.  We thought we'd check it out to see if it was still there!  On the way we saw a Cracker Barrel and pulled in for lunch, or in my case, breakfast!  I had 2 eggs, bacon, grits and biscuits with molasses!  It was yummy and was also dinner!

We got to the Estrella Sailport and Ted said it looked pretty much the same, with the addition of parachuting.  We saw a glider do a fly by of the runway.  It "blew" through at a very high rate of speed!  I had not seen that done before.  We watched two gliders take off with the help of a tow plane.

From there we headed home!

A fun day sightseeing in Casa Grande..."Ain't Life Grand!"

Blogging from Yuma!

We have moved on from San Diego, but let me recap the past few days.

Saturday Trent's team played really great until about the 5th inning which was not so good.  They tried to make a comeback and didn't give up but they just couldn't do it.  I took some pictures at the game!

 Trent and two players from his team.  Trent is on the far right!

 Trent and Tony (his dad and pitching coach)

On Sunday we were supposed to go to Trent's baseball travel team but the two teams they were playing against forfeited and so we met Jeri and Stach at Viejas for some gambling time.  Stach sits and watches sports while the three of us play.   I wasn't lucky at all, Jeri broke even and Ted was the big winner!  He was ahead about $19 and the three of us sat together and I look over and on a 20 cent spin Ted won $100.10!  He ended up taking home $150 more than he brought!  I was glad for him to win!

We then joined our friends Bruce and Kittye (front left), Tony and Gina (far right), Mallorie (daughter), Joey (friend of Trent) and Trent (son), (back left), Stach (taking picture) and Jeri (front right) me and Ted for dinner at Casa de Pico in Grossmont.  We had a fun dinner and caught up with Bruce and Kittye.

Monday we had lunch with our friend Peggy and got ready to leave on Tuesday.  Tuesday we drove to South Coast RV so they could change our upside down axle.  We had the axle installed in Gallop, New Mexico last August.  They ordered it wrong and just put it on anyway.  Fortunately we had not had any problems with it (so far).  So they had to get new brackets and rearrange the axle.  Of course the brakes had to come off and it ended up not getting done until 4:30.  We decided to parking lot camp and leave on Wednesday.

We called Jeri and Stach and asked them if they wanted to meet us at Zorba's, a Greek Restaurant in Chula Vista and they did.  We had a really fun dinner with them before heading back to the parking lot!  

We got to Yuma around 12:30 yesterday.  It got down to 50 degrees around the Golden Acorn Casino (no, we didn't stop) and was up to 82 when we first got to Yuma Lakes Campground.  I think it got warmer than that but not sure how warm.  We had a nice breeze so didn't seem too hot!  We had lunch over at the Cracker Barrell!  They have great breakfasts (my favorite).  We found our three nephews (and Ted) baseball caps.  The nephews have a favorite saying "Living the Dream" and we found caps that said that!  It reminds us of our favorite saying "Ain't Life Grand"!  They only had the four hats and they were pretty masculine looking so we got Claire a pretty candle for the house!  We got them off in the mail to them today!

Tomorrow we are leaving here for Casa Granda, about 180 miles east.  We will spend the weekend there and do some sightseeing!

Just living the dream..."Ain't Life Grand!"