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Published: January 21st 2023
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Well, here we are, out of town again.
On January 16 we flew to Phoenix with Kevin and Raye Guynn, because we had planned to attend an in-person meeting for Marriage Encounter. When it was changed to a zoom meeting, we decided to vacation anyway. Can you believe we had probably the only empty middle seat on the plane! The “Fell effect”? John?
The Guynns provided the rental car and we provided the rooms at the Blue Green in Peoria, just like last summer. But, unlike last summer, it was cool (60ish for a high?) with blue blue skies.
Our first day we spent another 4 hours at least at the amazing Musical Instrument Museum. I’ll just include one photo – the homemade instruments made by and for school children in Paraguay. No photos can do the place justice. It’s amazing. And with my poor memory, I could go every week and rediscover so much each time 😊
The next day we returned to the Desert Botanical Gardens – where in August we could only manage about 20 minutes before resting. Saguaros and cacti of all sorts everywhere. Even some Chijuly ones at the entrance. We started
on a short tour, where we learned why the Palo Verde trees have green bark (so even when the leaves fall off in drought time, the tree still processes chlorophyll) and that all cacti have skeletons of some sort. Then we wandered the entire property and FOUND OUR FIRST ROADRUNNER! In fact, we ate lunch sitting under a tree where another roadrunner was sitting – who knew?
Every day we saw hot air balloons, like a dozen one day.
On Thursday the 19
th we picked up our own car and drove about 3 hours south of Tucson, while the Guynns proceeded to CA to visit their son. We drove around a birding area in between Phoenix and Tucson called Santa Cruz Flats – where there were more helicopters than birds as it’s a training area for the air national guard. There were lots of red-tailed hawks, but the most spectacular birds were the many Vermilion flycatchers, gorgeous. And new bird #2 for us, a Brewer’s sparrow (not very pretty, so no photo).
This AirBnB is just a large room with kitchenette but it has a largish back yard, and the very first night we found new bird
#3, a phainopepla – which is kind of like a black cardinal, with a wild looking crest.
Friday was birding all day, driving south almost to the Mexican border (only about an hour away) to the Patagonia Humming Bird gardens and State Park with lake. We passed gorgeous views like these snow-covered mountains. There were so many birds at the first place our heads were spinning. I’ll just include the violet-crowned hummer, which glowed a neon purple in the light, and how about these photos of Anna’s humming birds dive-bombing? They are all very aggressive when they want to be, although the violet one sat like a little white marshmallow for quite long times. At the State Park we took a long hike and saw quite a few ducks and birds (nothing new but still exciting).
We are never going to retire to another state, but if we did, this area would be very tempting, rather than in Phoenix with its huge roads and many cars. However, many of the main roads are huge – guess they expect growth.
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