Our plans were to head from McDowell Mountain to Parker over on the Colorado River. Judy and Bruce added a wrinkle to that plan. After their conference in Scottsdale they wanted to spend a day in Prescott and then a couple days in Sedona. So we decided to join them in Prescott.
Month: March 2015
The Heard Museum 2/26/2015
Everyone we asked said that we should go to the Heard Museum in Phoenix. It is a museum of South West native American history and culture. We had one day with Judy and Bruce. We thought we might be able to get through the Heard Museum and then the Botanical Gardens. We had heard that the Heard Museum wasn’t very large and wouldn’t take too long to see. But we decided to go to the Heard and see how it went. If there was time left at the end of the day maybe we could go for a walk in the desert near our campsite for our botanical hit.
McDowell Mountain Regional Park, 2/20/2015 – 2/27/2015
Phoenix is in Maricopa County. The county has several regional parks, four have campgrounds.
Saguaro National Park
2/14 – 2/20/2015
The cores are all interconnected but there is space between them. The dead saguaro are collected and the wooden poles that make up the core are used for poles in roof structures and fences and just about everything that could use something like these.
Signal Hill is a high hill that can be seen for a long way. They probably built signal fires on it at one time. The main attraction today is to see the petroglyphs left by the Hohokam people, who inhabited this area from 500 to 1100 A.D. The blue sky is pretty blue as well.
Pima Air Museum, The Boneyard. Tucson, AZ
Davis-Monthan Airforce Base is located in the city limits of Tucson. Of course out west city limits seem to extend 30 or 40 miles outside of what one would consider the end of town. Probably has to do with water.
There were many planes here including an SR71 Blackbird spy plane, the Airforce 1 plane used by LBJ and a Constellation used by Eisenhower. There was a smaller private jet also used by LBJ and Lady Bird to fly to the short runway at their ranch. LBJ called it Air Force 1/2. There were all types of helicopters, old tankers, every type of B-52 bombers and all of its predecessors. We have been to many aircraft museums and beyond the number of planes here the number of different types of planes that we have never seen anywhere else was exceptional.
There is another commercial aircraft boneyard north of Tucson where big white older passenger jets are lined up for miles.
Tucson
We got to the Diamond J RV park after hours so we stayed in the dry camp area (no hookups) overnight. We weren’t there more than 5 minutes when a guy on a three wheeled tricycle-like bike with a hand crank mechanism for propelling it showed up. He was over a couple rows with his Foretravel coach, a 40′, 2000, single slide. His name was Frank and his wife’s name was Susan and they were full timing with a home base in Maine. One row away was a 1992 Foretravel GranVilla that had been restored at the factory including a full body paint job in 2009. They were Kent and Peggy mostly full timing from Oklahoma.
Yellow flowers seemed common. The saguaro get white flowers on the ends of thier arms and have a red fleshy fruit that is harvested to make wine and jams by the local native american tribal people.
Then there are the flat prickly pear cactus and in the bottom right a very interesting cactus whose new growth looks like fruit but the older growth has very sharp barbed spines. Pieces break off to start new plants. They are called jumping cactus because they seem to jump at you and embed themselves into your fingers. At least that is what happened to me. It took 10 minutes to get the small piece off of me and pull all of the quills out. I had to use a pliers.
It was a 2003, 40′ GranVilla. It is unique because it is the only one ever built with a tag axle (second rear axle) and it is the last one ever built. It belonged to Ed from California who drove over to see his friend who was there in a SOB (some other brand).