Today we didn’t do nothing. Nope, we just sat around resting our bones. So, technically, we did do something, just not much.
I took Max out early for a long walk which was a good thing because of the rain later in the day. The sky was overcast and there was significant cloud coverage on the surrounding mountains, so it was obvious that something was going to happen.
On this walk, I let Max take the lead to see where he would take me. He took us quite a way from our normal route and we wound up near the fence that encompasses the airplane bone yard. It’s an impressive site and I haven’t been able to get a decent photo that shows how amazing it is. So, I took some more photos and decided to do a little editing to see if it would help. Here’s what I got.
Understand, this is a very small portion of the planes that are stored at this facility. I would like to see the area where the old fighter planes are stored but I’m not sure that we have access to that area from the active part of the base. So, just let your imagination run wild. You can also Google Davis-Monthan Boneyard or just use the link and be amazed.
We almost made it back to the rig before the rain started so we both got a little bit wet. Max didn’t mind. He loves to get the water toweled off.
Then it rained. It rained really hard, and there was a lot of thunder. Max could hear it before we could and barked, but when it got into our hearing range, he was quiet. He doesn’t mind that getting wet plays havoc with his hair. He doesn’t care about that either. We got outside a few other times between the heavy rain showers during the day, but they were short walks. It rained pretty must all day. In Oregon it would be a drizzle between the rainstorms.
Here’s a photo from yesterday that I couldn’t include with that post because I was having problems transferring it to the laptop.
I stood behind our rig to take this. A pretty magnificent sunset, right?
You all have one guess as to who did what. Tic tock tic tock tic tock.
OK, time’s up. You’re all wrong. Diane was the couch potato today. I went thrift storing.
Diane stayed home and watched all the football games I was interested in while I went shopping and made an honest attempt to purchase things I know she would like. For instance, in one store I spent a couple of hours sitting on a couch going through a large box of Christmas cards, picking out the really cute ones I knew she’d like. I also found a couple of really nice shirts for her, and a really handy little cooler. I didn’t get anything for myself.
Diane’s main goal was to watch the Oregon vs. Michigan game so she could fill me in on what happened. Unfortunately, she fell asleep before half time so missed a pretty good game. Thankfully, it was set to record so I was able to watch it after I got home.
She didn’t even wake up when I returned and that was OK. She’s having difficulty sleeping about every other night. Usually, it’s because Max sleeps crossways on the bed. That never bothers me because I generally don’t sleep well anyway. That’s why I crave naps in the daylight hours but rarely get one.
After a brief respite upon returning home, I cooked dinner. Diane suggested hamburgers, our go to meal when in doubt. They were pretty good. We even had good fries using our handy dandy little air fryer.
After dinner I took Max for his evening walk, and he got to visit with Ally for a bit. They’re great friends.
Ally belongs to Dawn, the legs on the left below. The legs on the right belong to Linda.
We whiled away the evening watching fun things on TV. Then, all the sudden, it was bedtime again.
After breakfast Diane drove us back to the Last Outpost in Old Tucson to swap the shirt I mentioned yesterday. While she bartered with the store manager, Max and I wandered around the parking lot. The last time we were here I found a crisp $5 bill just lying there on the ground. That’s almost as good as finding a heads-up penny. We didn’t find any more during our walk. We were about halfway across the parking lot when Diane came out of the store. Since we were the only ones in the parking lot, I turned Max loose and told him to go get Mom.
He took off like the wind and got to her just in time for Diane to open the car door. He didn’t hesitate about jumping in. There was no way he was going to be left behind. That, and he loves to ride in the car.
Next, we drove to Mission San Xavier to get a refrigerator magnet, something we forgot to do during our last visit. I walked around the mountain adjacent to the mission while Diane bought me a tiny saguaro cactus. We hope it grows from its tiny state to a magnificent remembrance of this area.
Max and I climbed the hill adjacent to the Mission proper. It’s not very tall but gives one a nice view of the valley in all directions. This was the best view. The mission is like a massive jewel in the wilderness.
Looking the other way, you can see the “mountain” Max and I climbed.
Diane needs to print the AAA Trip Tiks she’s working on for our return trip to civilization, so we decided to get a small printer so she can study the routes. The first likely place to get one was the Base Exchange (BX). So, that’s where we went first. They had slim pickings and didn’t have the one I thought would be best. So, we drove to Costco and found just the right one.
I’m so happy Diane likes doing that because I’m much better at traveling as a silent observer instead of all that front end stuff necessary to make the trip pleasant. She’s a stellar planner and makes the trip easy on me since I’m the bus driver. We no longer feel the need to get from Point A to Point B the quickest way possible. Now we go from Point A to Point Z and visit all the places in between. It’s much more relaxing.
After Costco, we drove home in time for supper. Max didn’t care that he’d been home alone after lunch. He spied on our neighbors and ran to them and was rewarded with treats. Those are way better than supper. Our neighbors are Patricia and Laurie, Mother and Daughter. They dressed up for Halloween.
Awesome neighbors and they love Max, too.
We watched a little Dish TV then streamed “White Collar” on Netflix, but it wasn’t buffering well. Lots of pauses at night so we discussed, again, getting our own hotspot. I know I can get one from Verizon, but I’d like to do it through AT&T since we already have service with them. Should get a break because of that. Perhaps you remember I tried doing that in California, but it didn’t work out. I’m going to try again. I’m sure you will be holding your breath waiting for the results so I’ll report back as quickly as I can.
Guess what! As you may have guessed, Saguaro NP West looks a lot like Saguaro NP East. So, they are essentially the same but different. The West version seems to have way more saguaro cacti sprouting on it’s portion of the Sonoran Desert. I think that’s true. Yeah, pretty sure. If someone determines that I’m wrong, I’ll deny it. I can do that because I’ve decided to be a politician in the near future, and it seems to be OK if they are not completely accurate when they speak.
We drove through entire forests of incredible saguaros on the way to our destination, but we stopped by Old Tucson first, which is a few miles before the park. Turns out that Old Tucson was closed, except for the Last Outpost. So, while I walked Max around the enormous, empty, parking lot, Diane bought us each T-shirts to commemorate the event. Later, when we got home, Diane discovered that she got an XL for me. She meant to get an M, but the XL was on the hangar. So, we need to go back tomorrow to trade the XL for an M.
From the trinket store we drove straight to the park without mishap. The park visitor’s center is surrounded by millions of saguaros, so it was a good place to put this national park. The variety of shapes is amazing, and they are all unique.
Even Max was interested.
There are many hiking trails throughout the park but those are not for us. We limit our walking from the car to a bathroom and perhaps a gift shop. The exception on this trip was our stop at the Desert Museum.
Museums interest us and we try to visit them when we can, so we stopped at this one. Diane didn’t want to go in so she found a parking spot in the shade, which was amazing, where she and Max could wait for my return.
I went to the entry to see what it was all about and found these brass figures of javelinas.
They stand mostly in the sun all day long so that pink piece of paper you can see on the big one is a warning that says “HOT”. I wanted to make sure that was true, so I touched it. It was.
Then I got to the entrance and saw this sign:
That’s when I turned and went back to the car. Diane and Max were surprised to see me so soon but understood when I explained that there’s no way I was paying $29.95 to enter a museum that was going to close in about 30 minutes. I wouldn’t pay it even if it was going to be open for the next 30 hours. They were on my side. So, we left.
As Diane was pulling out of the parking lot I spied this beauty and convinced her to stop and let me out for a few seconds. We had seen pictures of this kind of saguaro but could not see any in all the fields we viewed. Then there was this one right in plain view.
You have to admit that this is a very stunning cactus. Now one I talked with could explain to me what causes some of them to grow like this. That’s OK. I can live with the mystery. Our stop here was amazing even though neither of us went into the museum.
Then we went home. That’s part of Tucson in the distance.
It was chilly this morning. Like 48 degrees! That is legitimately chilly. Actually, it was cold. So, I got to wear long socks, long pants, and two hoodies when I took Max for his morning walk. That was at 0730. Couldn’t quite see my breath so I was bummed.
Ok, it was 48.7 degrees. Picky, picky.
Walking briskly warmed us up a little, but it was still cold.
I did my normal morning routine to get my breakfast which is mainly to be quiet like a mouse, but that never works out. Something always makes a racket which Diane can easily hear. Thankfully, she doesn’t complain about it. Honestly, I think she’s OK that I make a little noise because by doing so she is reassured that I’m alive and moving. Even then I think in the back of her mind she’s prepared to hear the heavy thud I’ll make when I land on the floor for any reason. So far, that hasn’t happened. I practice that move when Max and I are home alone. Yes, I practice falling in the RV as quietly as possible. That’s kind of lame, I know, but what the heck. Gives me something to do. What will most likely happen is I’ll fall off the stairs leaving the rig and I’ll land on the gravel. I doubt if she would hear that so now I need to train Max to start barking when I fall to get attention. I tried to teach him to run back in the RV to the bedroom to bark, but he wanted to stay with me. Teaching him to bark is a challenge because when he does it voluntarily, he gets scolded a little. So, the best bet is for me to just lay where I land and wait for someone to show up.
You know, I’ve fallen a few times walking Max and I’ve never been concerned about getting back up but after writing it out like that, it’s suddenly something that kind of bothers me. Like, how long would I have to lay there until someone shows up and rolls me over to get my face out of the rocks.
OK. Enough of that.
The 1st thrift store Diane found was really nice. Max got to in and look around too. He loves to shop, and he gets lots of attention.
While Diane was visiting the 2nd store Max, and I stayed in the car and did some research about lunch. The one I found, Frank’s, was right up our alley. Here’s his reader board out front:
Here’re the t-shirts worn by the waiters and cooks:
I totally understand the T-shirt because it’s a pretty small place so they don’t want folks hanging around too long after they’re done eating.
Here’s what we ate. Diane had taquitos and I had a chicken fried steak:
After lunch we travelled to the 3rd stop on Diane’s list, but it wasn’t there. We took that as a hint that we’d apparently hit our thrift store limit for the day. So, we went back home. On the way, we stopped for this photo op that we’d seen on the way to lunch.
Kind of difficult to fathom that one, isn’t it? Makes one wonder a little about the history of Jerrie Blvd, right?
As soon as we got home, I immediately took Max for a well-earned walk. On the way back we saw a new neighbor pull in.
That’s the biggest Class C rig I’ve ever seen. It’s a Newmar from Alaska. He was parking the trailer that he apparently carries his car on. I’ll be curious to see what it is.
Now I’m going to rest before watching game 5 of the World Series.
The calendar today suggests we visit Saguaro National Park. Seeing the entire park requires that visitors travel to two locations, on either side of Tucson, to accomplish that goal. So, that’s what we plan to do. Max is going with us, but we haven’t told him the magnitude of the ride he must endure. I’m sure he won’t mind. He has yet to decline a ride.
It’s 0907 and we just finished breakfast so as soon as Diane gets the dishes all cleaned up (her chosen task), we’ll be on our way.
It got cold last night. When I got up the first time, around 0100-ish, it was 63 degrees, and the wind was blowing pretty hard. What woke us was the awning flapping around so I put it away so we can use it again someday.
About the park with two locations . . . I did a little research about that and came up with the understanding that when it was originally established in 1933 it was a Monument. Then, in 1961 the west section was added. Not until 1994 were both sections declared to be a National Park. So, this place is pretty new in that regard. Still, it’s been around long enough for most of the shiny parts to be dulled just a little. Even so, the magnificent Saguaro Cactus is the draw, and they are magnificent. Check the link and you, too, can be astounded.
Now I will stop and resume this when we return from our journey.
You may nap while we’re gone, if you wish.
It’s 1423 and I’m back, obviously. We’ve actually been back for a little while, long enough for Diane to fill up 5 washers in the laundry room which is a world record for her. She normally only uses 2 or 3.
The trip to Saguaro wasn’t a long one because we wound up at the section near the Rincon Mountains which is only about 9-10 miles away. The hard part, once we got through the gate, was the grueling 8-mile trip around a very small portion of the park. What makes it grueling is that only bicycles are allowed in the park. Fortunately, they have them for rent at the entrance, so I got each of us a bike and away we went.
I kept Max with me so he wouldn’t get all tangled up in Diane’s spokes, causing her to tumble. The added benefit for me by doing that was Max is a strong little guy, and he helped pull me up the hills. I could hear Diane huffing and puffing behind me so knew she was having difficulty. When I stopped at one of the turnouts, it took her about 15 minutes to catch up. Since Max was such a help to me, and he didn’t get tangled up, I decided to take a chance and hooked him up to Diane’s bike. I let her lead so I could be prepared to run to her rescue if he went nuts on her. But he didn’t. He was good as gold and led her the remaining way around that 8-mile loop without mishap. There were times when I thought they were going to outrun me. I kept up, but it wasn’t easy.
Here are some photos I took on that trip.
I should quit trying to get selfies because with these sunglasses I can’t see what I’m taking a picture of. It’s a crapshoot and sometimes OK.
The bike trail was entirely paved and easy on the buttocks for which we were both thankful. Max didn’t care.
I don’t know when we’ll get to visit the other half of this national park. Tomorrow, I see three thrift stores on the calendar, so we won’t be headed west. I must take Max to the dog wash, also. There will be a day free that we can pencil in Saguaro. Hopefully we’ll be able to drive through the other half, of maybe just perch ourselves on a high spot and just look around.
Tonight, we watched game 4 of the World Series. It started off nicely when Freddie hit his 4th homerun in 4 games for the Dodgers. Then the Yankees got busy. At the end of the 8th, the Yankees led 11-4. To get there they hit two (2) grand slam home runs. Quite impressive. I didn’t watch the 9th inning. Call me a fair-weather fan if you wish. I don’t mind.
Oh, ya. All that baloney about Max pulling Diane around the park was pure fiction. Some of you may have figured that out already, but I had to come clean. Max was ensconced in his throne, next to me, while Diane drove us around the park. That’s true.
In our shower is a large skylight and on the inside of the bathroom door there is a large mirror. Normally we keep the bathroom door open at night to ensure one of doesn’t wander into the living area in the middle of the night to urinate. That’s never happened, but there’s always that chance.
During the night, having the door open isn’t a problem but when the sun comes up it gets pretty bright in the bathroom. The light is magnified by the mirror on the bathroom door and shines right into my bride’s eyes.
The logical thing to do is shut it in the morning, right? Well, doing that doesn’t work because I’m always the first one up and doing what I have to do in the morning results in kitchen noises that are annoying.
So, it’s either leave the door shut and not make a sound or leave it open and let the mirror shine in Diane’s eyes. I’m toast either way, so I opt to leave it open because there’s absolutely no way I can get the coffee going or make my breakfast without making noise.
So, to remedy the problem I figured I can cover the skylight with a precision-cut piece of foam that can be removed when we want light to shine in. Looked good in my head, and Diane agreed, so we toddled Walmart so see about that foam.
But first, I broke out the vacuum cleaner hair device and used the roto zip attachment to grind down Max’s toenails. He didn’t mind at all which surprised us.
Before you knew what was happening, it was done.
Walmart didn’t have any foam.
So, we stopped at Arby’s because it was time for lunch, and we were hungry. Since we had Max with us, we chose to eat in the car, in a shady parking lot. I suppose we could have taken Max in but eating in the car seemed to be the more prudent choice. Max always gets treats from strangers when he tags along so we weren’t worried about him being hungry.
After lunch, we wandered over to Lowe’s and they had the foam I was looking for. We got it and headed back home.
Diane dropped me and Max at our front door then took another trip to the commissary to make sure we wouldn’t go hungry during the week. She always likes to stay a little ahead of the game when it comes to food because you never know when famine will strike.
Now all that’s left on the list is to give Max his bath. He’s about 1.5 weeks late on that event.
I have to report that my little arms and back are beat up and sore after the contortions I put them through installing that new faucet the other day. I have a couple of new hematomas and a variety of nicks and dings in addition to muscle fatigue. But, I can still kneel down and get back up. It hurts a bit, but I can do it.
The day ran out while watching the Dodgers win the 3rd game against the Yankees. One more to go. Because of that, Max didn’t get his bath tonight as planned. I did, however, get rid of his eye boogers. He seemed to be happy about that.
Now I must take my shower and retire for the evening.
Nothing scheduled but we had things to do so we did them.
The big item was to visit Camping World to get a new faucet for the kitchen sink. The old one leaks, and it irritate me immensely. A car trip was right up Max’s alley. He loves going anywhere because he always gets to meet new friends. He’s like a dog ambassador.
We got the proper faucet that looks exactly like the one that leaks so that was a plus. All I had to do was turn the water off, disconnect the old faucet and bolt up the new one. Easy-peasy, right. During this process we learned that Jerrie can still get on the floor and insert himself into some pretty small places. I had to get myself under the kitchen sink because his arms weren’t long enough to do it otherwise.
Surprisingly, he managed to get it all done without wounding himself and none of the four water lines he touched leaked once he declared the task complete. And the faucet worked.
Since we were already out and about, we stopped by our favorite Freddy’s Steakburger joint. It’s our favorite because . This time Diane had a patty melt and really liked it. I had double steak sandwich. It was good, too. Max liked getting inside out of the heat.
I forgot to share this photo from our trip to the RV show at the fairgrounds a couple or three days ago. This is as class C that Diane said, “I can drive this.” Then she pointed at the logo in the middle of the steering wheel, “but it’s a Ford.” I presumed that was a deal killer. Looks pretty comfy, though, don’t you think?
Once the overwhelming task of replacing the faucet was satisfactorily completed, Jerrie called it a day, took a shower, and went to bed. He took the shower under duress, but he should have done it willingly because it was Saturday. That’s his shower day. Actually, that’s only one of his shower days.
Lydia sent us a box of mail on Day 51. The mailbox folks sent it USPS instead of UPS. Usually that wouldn’t matter, but USPS mail is not delivered to the RV site. They hold it for a week then send it back. It’s up to us to go pick it up. I learned that today when I took a trip to pick up the box.
The heat has returned and is going to ascend into triple digits once more. But the temp drops drastically at night into the 60’s and will sometimes drop into the 40’s range. Thank goodness our A/C units work properly. So far.
Diane took a trip to the BX to get an electric razor for her legs. I told her she needs legs like mine. Mine have no hair. I’ve enjoyed that kind of hairlessness for many years. For some reason the little I had was either absorbed by my body or it just fell off when I wasn’t looking. Lucky me, right?
When she returned, Max and I were sitting on the patio enjoying the dissipating heat after a long walk. After sitting with us for a bit, she declared it time for supper, so we went in to eat her stew that’s been cooking for a couple of days. I didn’t take a picture of it, but I did get a shot of the meat while I was cooking it yesterday.
There just isn’t anything better than homemade stew.
This evening Diane and I had the honor of watching the LA Dodgers win the first game of the 2024 World Series 6-3 in extra innings against the NY Yankees. We didn’t start watching the game until the top of the 9th with the score tied 2-2. No one scored in the 9th so it went to extra innings. NY was batting first and managed to score 1 run so to keep it going the Dodgers had to score at least 1 run. With 1 out they got a hit, and the next batter walked. Next up was Ohtani, the Dodgers heavy hitter. He hit a long ball that was caught by the left fielder who promptly fell over a wall out of bounds. That was out 2 and it’s my understanding that because the left fielder fell out of bounds with the ball, the runners got to advance so runners were on 2nd and 3rd.
Then the Freddie Freeman came up to bat and the bases were loaded. I didn’t understand how a runner wound up on 1st base because I never saw a batter get a hit or get walked. But there he was. Freddie took the first pitch and drove it out for a grand slam walk off. That was significant for two reasons. 1) In all my life I’ve never witnessed a grand slam that won a game; and 2) That was the first walk off grand slam in World Series history.
Nope, it’s not fair time right now. We just went there to take a walk through a bunch of Tiffen RVs. In case you don’t’ know, they are pretty classy rigs. Like over the top, classy. The best one cost $700,000.00. That isn’t a typo. Though it would be nice to have one, something like that just isn’t practical for folks like us. Seeing all those fancy rigs caused us to lean more in the direction of moving back to a trailer instead of upgrading the Bus. This is still a work in progress.
We didn’t take Max on this trip, but I doubt if anyone would have objected had he tagged along. For being such a good puppy, we took him to the off-leash dog park just a couple blocks away. When we got to the park, we saw this making its way across the sky …
When I first saw this, I thought it was just the contrail of a speeding aircraft. Diane said “no. It’s the comet!” I was easily convinced because the contrail didn’t linger like they usually do and seeing a comet is way cooler than seeing a high-flying aircraft. I mean, we’re living on an Air Force Base so high-flying aircraft are no big deal. According to the local info I could find this is the 80,000-year-old C/2023 Ag Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet. That’s quite a name. I suspect it’s meaningful to astronomers but why couldn’t they just call it Henry, or Alvin? Something simple? It’s supposed to be visible until the 26th so I’ll be looking for it again the next couple of days.
Once the comet was over the horizon we concentrated on Max, trying to get him to run, or chase his ball. He needs the exercise. But since this was his first time in this facility, he was more obsessed with sniffing pretty much every place where a dog could have marked his spot. That means he had to sniff, for a long time, anything that was vertical to the ground. The one exception was a pretty large hole that a previous dog had enlarged.
He maintained this position for about 3 minutes, waiting for something to happen, or for something to crawl up his nose, I’m not sure which. Apparently, nothing happened so he extracted himself and calmly resumed sniffing his surroundings. It must be difficult to be able to smell such an amazing variety of stuff and catalog it for future reference. Wears me out just thinking about it.
He finally gave up his quest to smell everything within the boundaries of the park and decided that we should go home. First, however, there was a playground nearby that Diane had to visit. It had slides.
I just knew there was still a little girl in there somewhere.
Then we went back to the bus for the rest of the evening.
Temporary Sanity ... 