The Last Month

Our last month at Palm Creek, Casa Grande AZ was great.  We enjoyed the area and explored the park as often as we could.  It really was a beautiful place - quite expensive for the two months we were there, but a wonderful experience.

We continued on with picket ball as well as pottery and line dancing, but we also had lots of time to tour around the park and look at some of the rock art that many residents had done.  These little gems were found all around the sites in the park but mostly on rock walls and driveways.  The rocks are ones found  around the area but it is the metal shells that people created around them that gave the rock art its particular flavor.

We had an opportunity to take 'the boys' to a four week beginner Dog Agility class and which took them through  a variety of tricks including tunnels and loops.  We had a great time and after four hard weeks, the boys both did very well and got certificates from the trainers.

In early March we attended the Subway Fresh Fit 500.  This is a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series stock car race held annually at Phoenix International Raceway in Avondale, Arizona. A 312-lap event that is one of only four NASCAR Cup Series events measured in kilometers rather than miles.  It was a very exciting time and the noise was amazing.

Enjoy this short video shot from our camera.  Turn your volume up!

We also had a chance to take in two major league spring training baseball games.   Spring training is a series of practices and exhibition games preceding the start of the regular season.  We watched the Chicago Cubs play the Chicago White Sox

and the LA Dodgers take on the Seattle Mariners.

Both were great games and it was a great thrill to be able to watch some of the well-known players and the skills shown on the field.  It is really a family sport there, with a lot of families picnicking on the grass outside the outfield and inside in the stands as the tickets are between $5 and $12 each, a whole family can spread a blanket on the grass outside the outfield for $10.

In mid March, Susan went home for a quick visit and to pick up Haley, our granddaughter,  during her Spring Break.   They came back to Phoenix in time for us to enjoy a few days in Casa Grande before heading off to the Good Sam Rally and home which included giving the boys a long needed bath!

During our visit with Haley we took her out Skeet shooting.  This was an experience she had never had before and although the initial shock of the shotgun going off was a startling one, she soon got into the swing of things and took a few shots of her own.  Susan continues to improve with her shooting and is beginning to catch on to the art of skeet and trap.

We also got a chance to go out and visit the Casa Grande ruins. These are some of the pictures of the Casa Grande ("Great House") and its surrounding compound.  One of the largest prehistoric structures ever built in North America; its purpose remains a mystery.

Archeologists have discovered evidence that the ancient Sonoran Desert people who built the Casa Grande also developed wide-scale irrigation farming and extensive trade connections, which lasted over a thousand years until about 1450.  Since the ancient Sonoran Desert people who built it left no written language behind, written historic accounts of the Casa Grande begin with the journal entries of Padre Eusebio when he visited the ruins in 1694. In his description of the large ancient structure before him, he wrote the words “casa grande” (or “great house”) which is still used today.  

Our last big adventure was to head down to Tucson and visit the Arizona Desert museum. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a 98-acre (40 ha) museum and zoo founded in 1952 and located just outside of Tucson.

It contains a museum and two miles (3.2 km) of walking paths on 21 acres (8.5 ha), and is one of the most visited attractions in Tucson. The facility combines the attractions of a zoo, museum, and botanical garden, with a focus on the plants and animals that live in the Sonoran Desert.  It has an outstanding display of birds and hummingbirds in huge natural outdoor enclosures.

The museum was a pioneer in the creation of naturalistic enclosures for its animals.

We left Casa Grande and headed up to Avondale (just to the west of Phoenix) for the Good Sam Rally.   In the summer of last year we had visited Redmond, Oregon which had approximately 6500 RVers for the Rally.  This year we had several friends from Chilliwack and Washington who were joining us and the Arizona sun beamed down on us and the other 3,370 RVrs.

We were treated to some great weather, a taste of Arizona’s history and culture and fabulous entertainment with headliner Martina McBride, country music’s 4-time winner of Female Vocalist of the Year, and Bill Cosby, everybody’s favorite comedian! Plus, Bowzer’s Rock N Roll Party from ShaNaNa, and the return of the Beatles’ tribute band, Ticket to Ride!  The shows were somewhat difficult to see because of the race track fences, but the music was great.

Haley accompanied us to every show and really enjoyed herself and we had fun watching her sing to songs that predated her birth.  Haley and Susan entered the boys in the Dog Show and made a good showing and we attended the Good Sam Life Members evening party where we met "Elvis", "Madonna", "Austin Powers" and others.

The ride home was a treat even though we did a lot of driving in a relatively short time.  We left Arizona and travelled into California, then Oregon and Washington.   In Washington we visited our new great, great nephew, Eric Alexander, Jr.  He was only 3 months old but came early enough so that Dad could see him before he went off to Afghanistan.

As we arrived back to the border on the 31^st of March we had travelled over 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) and had visited 9 Canadian Provinces, 10 US States and Mexico.   We had many great adventures, met a lot of very interesting people, saw some amazing sights and had a wonderful time.

This is the last blog entry of our 10-month journey around North America.  Next year’s adventure is already in the planning, so stay tuned…

Kerry, Susan, Bailey and Charlie

Tucson, Tombstone, Quartzsite and Casa Grande.

We arrived in Tucson, Arizona with Judy and Eric on January 12^th, 2012 and set up camp at Desert Trails RV Park. The park is an oasis of desert living, with mesquite trees, miniature gardens, Cacti, hidden sidewalks, hilltop views, oleander driveways and many varieties of palm trees. 

In the center of the RV Par is the "Desert Oasis” where the thick fauna and trees attract Horned Owls, Cardinals, Crested Hawks and Finches among over 50 varieties of birds seen in the Park during the winter months.

It is also very close to one of our destinations, Old Tucson Studios.   Old Tucson Studios is an old movie studio and theme park, adjacent to the Tucson Mountains close to the western portion of Saguaro National Park.  Built in 1939 for the movie Arizona, it has been used for the filming of several movies and television westerns.  Old Tucson served as an ideal location for shooting scenes for TV series like NBC's  Little House on the Prairie.  

This is the casket prop used in Clint Eastwood's movie Unforgiven.

Three Amigos was a popular comedy shot there in the 80s, utilizing the church set.  It was also used in Tombstone with Kurt Russell.

From 1989 to 1992 the show The Young Riders filmed here and at the Mescal sister site. The main street appears prominently in 1990s westerns such as Kurt Russell’s Tombstone.  A partial mirror set exists at Mescal, AZ.  

This building was featured in Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe’s The Quick and the Dead, which filmed the entire town of Redemption scenes there. 

John Wayne shot several movies here including “Rio Bravo” and McClintock.  Clint Eastwood filmed several of his western here as well.  It was really something to wander amongst the sets and props of some of our favorite old westerns and TV shows of years ago.

 Another major attraction of the area is the City of Tombstone.  Tombstone….that name means many things to many people. It creates images of gunfights and dusty streets, whiskey, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and tons of old western movie scenes.  But what many folks don't realize is that Tombstone is a real town with real inhabitants who have lived here throughout its history and still do today. 

That is part of the reason Tombstone has been called “The town to tough to die”.  We visited the OK Corral as well as Boot Hill and had a lot of fun prowling around the variety of shops inhabiting the main street.

 We then headed north to Quartzsite where we joined a FMCA Rally put on by the Beaver Ambassador Club and had a great time. Quartzsite is a popular RV camping area for winter visitors, and tourism is the major contributor to Quartzsite's economy.  Nine major gem, mineral, and 15 general swap meet shows are very popular tourist attractions, attracting about 1.5 million people annually, mostly in January and February.  We had a great time with big bonfires at night with lots of music as well as cookouts and a variety of games and tours around the desert.  In all we had 95 RVs attend the Rally.

We took Judy and Eric into Phoenix to continue their vacation with Steve and Cheryl and we headed back to Quartzsite where we had new shocks installed in our coach.

From Quartzsite we headed down to Casa Grande where we will spend the next two months before heading home in late March.  Casa Grande was founded in 1879 during the Arizona mining boom, specifically due to the presence of the Southern Pacific Railroad.  We were looking so forward to coming here because of the activities that were offered and the proximity of the town to south Arizona where we could take some side trips.   At the Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort we found shuffleboard, billiards, horseshoes, water volleyball, softball, tennis and a putting green as well as water exercise, weight room, Yoga and Pilates.   

We took part in a lot of crafts classes include pottery, sewing and quilting but just couldn’t find time for a lot of the other activities including oil and watercolor painting, woodshop and carving, lapidary, silversmith and stained glass.  We attended the monthly craft fairs featuring vendors from around the state an of course, enjoyed line dancing and pickleball.  The resort offered us a great 18 hole executive golf course as well.   This is our street and our house…..

Our first month ended with some of the busiest times ever.  We biked around the resort several times, played pickleball three times a week, line danced three times a week, attended 10 pottery classes while working on a variety of projects.   Susan's pottery was featured in the Resort's Pottery Fair.

Here are some of our other pottery projects.

We are looking forward to continuing all of our activities for the next month including a visit from granddaughter Haley in mid March and the Good Sam Rally in Phoenix.