Feb 12th - Into the Desert

Red Tailed Hawk before flight

Take off - No. 1 hawk

Enter second hawk

Mating or fighting?

Continuing to play?

There are shoe trees; bottle trees, bra trees......cup trees?

Catalina State Park, Tucson, Az

Thank goodness for road signs!

Even dead cacti are beautiful

Boondocking site - my dry river bed cairn

It has warmed up!  Finally! It seems we have been everywhere twice looking for warmth...wait....we have!  We left Organ Pipe Cactus Park just as the major freeze was over but we were low on propane gas for the rig and food for the humans.  We found gas in Why, AZ  just north of the park.  We discovered that we were very fortunate to find any at all.  Because of the cold snap (I use that phrase lightly because it was damn cold)  all the propane gas carriers were sold out and the business where we stopped that morning had just gotten her supply after being without for 3 days!  We continued north through Ajo, AZ and stopped for the night in a Casino parking lot south of Phoenix.  Once again we were given a token $10 and I came out with $15 on the slots.  We stayed long enough to see who won the Super Bowl and walked back to our motor home in bright, bright Dusk to Dawn lights!  The night sound effects were  wound up and playing loudly all through the night.  It was like being in the middle of a four lane highway with five overpasses woven over our heads.  Car alarms, horns, fire truck sirens, ambulances and, of course the frequent car driving by with the radio turned up to about 300 decibels complete with tummy rumbling bass.  It is an experience to "camp" in a casino parking lot. 

What a change now as I sit here soaking up the silence and warmth  in the desert just west of Gila Bend, Az - our second pass through this area. This time "we" decided to find this boondocking spot by checking out the DeLorme map program on the computer  looking for Bureau of Land Management - BLM land. We (you and I ) can camp free on this land.      We drove north out of Gila Bend, AZ.,  turned west onto a two track dirt road that had us pass by some of the lushest, greenest alfalfa fields I have ever seen.  Yup, right in the middle of the desert!  You have to know every chemical known to man and then some have been used to obtain  the florescent green glow that these fields emit. Just think, we eat the beef and pork that is fed this funky fodder.

   We continued on for about nine miles at about the same rate of speed as the distance we covered,  for an hour and a half to come out on  the road we were looking for!  We did it....our way.  We could have driven out of town on the blacktop and been in the same spot in oh, probably 5 minutes but we had an adventure!!! 

So here we are in this absolutely beautiful desert with not another human soul around for as far as the eye can see.  We are in  a 360 degree panorama of mountains, cactus, and lest I forget to mention.......rocks!