My Life and Travels
Also on Tuesday we drove 15 miles into the mountains to “Tortilla Flat” the last surviving stage coach stop on the Apache Trail.
The town is these three buildings along the highway. They promote the town as having a population of 6.
After walking the length of the town I felt “Welcome”.
Today we went to the Superstition Mountain Museum a couple of miles from the park.
They have a real full size ore stamping machine from a local gold mine.
We went to Costco in Mesa today. It was crazy busy and I felt young. Another clear 82 degree day.
We have had this motorhome since November 2004 and it wasn’t until we retired that we started pulling a car. One of the irritating challenges of hooking up the car’s tow bar is getting the correct distance from the hitch on the motorhome.
From the driver’s seat I can not see where the tow bars hook onto the car.
The hitch on the motorhome has sliding arms which give me about six inches of margin. Just before we left home this fall I made this stand and put a piece of doweling in it which I can see from the driver’s seat.
Since I took this picture I have added a string to measure the distance between the dowel and the hitch locking ring so I have the correct distance every time. This system has made hooking up the car a lot easier.
I added these pieces of parachute line to the safety lock rings last year. We were at Fort Flagler and I moved the motorhome about a 100 yards before I hooked up the car. When I got the car in place one of these safety rings was missing. Somewhere along that 100 yard road it fell off and bounced into the grass where I could not find it. Live and learn.
We went to an olive grove today; Queen Creek Olive Mill.
It was interesting and we purchase some tasty olive oils. They have a “Bacon” flavored olive oil.
The grove is currently 7000 trees and 16 different types of olives.
The olives are mixed to produce the flavor they are looking for:
washed
moved up to the grinder
than the centrifuge, which is the round stainless steel head in the middle of the machine. The oil comes out the bottom spout just above the “H” in Harry. This is their small machine, they also have one which will do 2.5 tons an hour.
It was a nice day.
We drove over to Peoria looking for a RV park for March 2016 and spring training. Since we don’t know anyone who has taken their RV to Spring Training it has been a challenge to find a park. One of my goals in coming to Phoenix was to find a place for Spring Training. The Peoria visitor’s center was not all that much help. Their did have a list of more parks then I could find online however it was just a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers, nothing about any of the parks.
The park we have reservations for is in Goodyear 25 miles from the ball park. They have 438 sites and as of this morning had 12 open sites in March. I guess this is why it is hard to find any information about the parks. They are all sold out every year so there is no point on spending any time or money letting people know you exist.
We are set and I’ll get game tickets when they go on sale in November. Retirement is good.
We went to Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa today.
This display covers three floors high and has a flash flood every 20 minutes.
Lots of hands on displays, this actual bone says:
“Please Touch”.
Most of the pictures I took involved dinosaurs, however the museum covers time back to the beginning of the universe to current time with Arizona movies.
These displays show how fossils appear in nature.
Numerous large animals.
The last thing we did was pan for GOLD.
Great museum and we had a wonderful afternoon.
Hank and I got out for a walk this morning.
One thing about the desert, all the plants want to kill you.
I did learn a new word today, “vegan fur”.
Here are a couple more pictures from this afternoon the evening.
We are getting some heavy showers this evening.
Monday of a travel date, we plan to be here for two weeks.
This is a nice state park and we are in a new section of the park. I made the reservations a couple of weeks ago for two weeks. We were lucky to find a park which has sites open for two weeks, the weekends are usually full for reservation sites. We are in site 85.
In camp all day currently watching the Seahawks game. This will be our last day in New Mexico for a while, we are currently planning on attending the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta next October. We will be leaving early tomorrow morning for Phoenix and Lost Dutchman SP, it will be an 8 to 9 hour day on the road.
During the last 14 months and our three trips south we have spent 65 nights in New Mexico. We will spend the next two and a half weeks in Arizona and then home for Thanksgiving.