Rex and Nancy's Travels - "ALL WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST" - JRR Tolkein

After a nice January, February started out cold with a couple of days with the highs in the low 40’s! By the second week in February we were back up into the mid 70’s and even hit the low 80’s a day or two. We had a great time at the park’s Valentine’s Day Dinner. We ate a great steak dinner and afterward enjoyed music provided by a DJ. We hiked to an area above Canyon Lake where we could look down into the lake just below the Horse Mesa Dam, which separates Canyon and Apache lakes. The scenery was spectacular.     Here are some future arches. We will need to come back in a few hundred years to see them!               We hiked to the top of a butte and could see the upper part of Canyon Lake This rock formation is called “bear cub rock” as it looks like a bear cub climbing a tree.                 These are some of the rose quartz that we found laying on the grou...

The first few days of January were still cold but it soon started getting warmer. We had 4 nights in a row of temperatures below freezing – this is a rarity here in the valley. We then enjoyed temperatures in the high 60’s and low 70’s for most of the month – this is the reason we spend our winters in Arizona! Our friends, Leroy and Jinx, from Benson, AZ visited us for a couple of days. We took a drive to Canyon Lake and enjoyed a cruise on the Dolly – it was windy and a little chilly but we had a great ride and got to see some Big Horn Sheep and a Bald Eagle.  After our cruise we had lunch at Tortilla Flats, one of our favorite places.   Tortilla Flats is an old stage stop between Roosevelt Lake and Apache Junction.   It is located a couple miles upstream from Canyon Lake.   There is a restaurant, a gift shop, an ice cream store and a small museum.   The walls of the restaurant are covered in $1 bills and the bar stools are saddles.     ...

Rex has kept busy helping with a remodel on the Dolly Steamboat. They took off the top deck and are building a new one which encloses more of the deck. He also continues to enjoy being a crew member on the cruises. He also has been helping Charlie, the local handyman in the park. He helped build a set of front steps and a small back deck for Mary Jane, the lady whose dog we walk every day. They also built a new floor for her shed, insulated her shed and installed a washer and dryer in her shed. Nancy has enjoyed hiking every Tuesday and Friday with groups from the park – unfortunately, Rex’s work schedule did not allow him to hike in December. Here are a few highlights from some of the hikes. We hiked in Gold Canyon to Hieroglyphic Canyon, which goes to some great petroglyphs. Why it is called Hieroglyphic Canyon when there are petroglyphs and not hieroglyphics – no one knows! The petroglyphs have been dated from A.D. 700 to A.D. 1100 when the Hohokam Indians inhabited the area....

Many more residents arrived and more activities have started in the park this month. We hike with 2 hiking groups each week. On Tuesdays we go with the “Stop and Smell the Roses” group which takes easier hikes with plenty of time to look at the surrounding area. On Friday’s we go with the “Friday Hike” group which does a little harder and longer hikes. Rex gets to go on some of the hikes depending on his work schedule. On days we are not hiking, Nancy does a floor exercise class at 8 am followed by a water aerobics class at 9 am. We are still taking Bailey with us on our daily walks with Camille and Cody. We also went on a 4-wheel drive trip with our Jeep group to Mt. Lemmon by Tucson. We drove up the back side of Mt. Lemmon and stopped at Summerhaven for a picnic lunch. Summerhaven is a small resort town by the ski area. We then took the highway back to Apache Junction. We keep forgetting to take our camera with us so we don’t have any hiking or 4-wheeling pictures yet. The park hos...

The first week we were in Arizona it was 104-107 F every day. We had a storm on Tuesday evening, the 5th, with high wind, heavy rain and some hail. We survived the storm OK but one RV here lost an awning and a few carports were damaged. One of our neighbors lost their Saguaro cactus. There was a lot of damage in the Mesa and Tempe area with power poles and trees lying on roofs. On Wednesday morning, there were 8 tornados around the Flagstaff area. One small town, Bellemont, lost 30 homes and a large number of RVs. The local news showed a picture of a Mobile Suites on its side. The door was against the ground so they had to rescue the couple through the back window. Was really sad to see a 5th wheel like ours destroyed. Luckily there was no one seriously injured in these storms. The storms brought some cooler weather and the forecast is for no more triple digit temperatures until next spring – Yeah! We bought a storage shed from another resident of the park. We were ...

We left Midland Monday morning and the truck is running great. We drove to El Paso and then up to Deming, NM where we spent the night at the Low-Hi RV Park. The park is nice and is the headquarters for Loners on Wheels, a singles camping organization. We were walking the dogs and got to view this spectacular New Mexico Sunset. Tuesday morning we had a good time watching this Roadrunner running around behind our 5 th wheel. We drove down I-10 to Lordsburg, NM and then headed North on Highway 70 through Globe and Superior, AZ. We arrived in Apache Junction early Tuesday afternoon and boy is it hot here - it was 104o F when we arrived. The forecast is for triple digits the rest of the week and then in the high 90’s next week. It is about 10o warmer here than normal. It seems like it has been 10o warmer than normal everywhere we have been this fall. We got settled into our site at Golden Sun RV Resort and are the only ones on our street. The park is really empty this time ...

Shortly after noon on Wednesday we noticed that the truck was losing power on the small hills of west Texas. It kept getting worse and black smoke starting coming out of the tailpipe. We stopped at a roadside picnic area about 30 miles east of Midland where the truck died and wouldn’t start again. Thank goodness for Good Sam Emergency Road Service! They found a towing company that had a truck big enough to tow the truck & 5th wheel.   They towed the truck & 5th wheel to the Ford dealership in Midland and we followed in the Jeep. We got there at 6 pm just as the dealership was closing. The tow truck driver parked the truck & 5th wheel on a side street beside the dealership and that’s where we spent the night. We couldn’t open the slide outs all the way so ate out at a great Mongolian grill with Jen, Rex’s daughter. After dinner we visited with Jen at her apartment until it was time to call it a night. Luckily the street the 5th wheel was parked on was a dead-end stre...