Blogs from Arizona, United States, North America - page 10

During my time as a full-time RVer, 2010 – 2020 (during which time, I spent at least one week in all fifty states), I generally spent the seven days of the week with three days for “housekeeping” (laundry, oil changes, grocery shopping, selecting and captioning photos and writing the narrative for the blog), three days for tourism and one day for relocation to a new RV park. Given that 2022 will find every tour day filled with tourism and every non-tour day filled with “coffee on the plaza with the locals,” don’t expect much original narrative during the 2022 trip. My plan is to give my audience a daily, captioned, pictorial essay accompanied by the narrative of the day’s activities as supplied by the tour provider. Some tour operators have tendered interesting, meaningful descriptions whereas others ... read more

Good Friday of course, and at the end of the day of birding we were sure to be back at the house at 4 pm, which was 7 pm in Ohio, so we could watch the Good Friday service at Advent. There simply aren’t any churches around here. It was better than nothing, but still sad to be away from our church family. We left here earlier than ever, out by 7:20, to head up to the top of the big hill again in search of particular birds that like that altitude (about 8000' compared to Portal at 4700’). Funnily enough we didn’t see ANY of them, but ran into someone we’ve seen just about everywhere, who was scoping out a camping site. These people are HARDY! Camping might even be free up there, but most ... read more

Boy it was cold this morning – we awoke to about 37 degrees!! So I begged off on the early-morning hike. We got to one of the “in town” bird feeding stations at Dave Jaspers at 8:15. There are a number of “public” bird feeder stations around Portal – in fact they are marked on the map that everyone hands out. Donation boxes sit out, and we see many people popping $1 in them “for the bird feed,” and indeed they probably spend that much, filling the sugar water, sunflower seeds, finch flax, corn, etc 2-3 times a day. Often someone from the house will come out and sit, and point out birds too, which is extra fun. We saw 2 NEW hummers today: the Lucifer (he didn’t look that evil, but is the only humming ... read more

Wow, the hours are flying by, like the very strong winds that continue in this area. We were up with the birds as usual and soon after breakfast were sitting outside in the back watching the birds eat their breakfasts too. It was very chilly but we also “walked the perimeter.” We did see another javelina. Evidently the big male we saw yesterday has a bad back leg, which David noticed, so his name is “Gimpy.” And 2 more outside the property. And a handful of mule-deer - they are large! We drove into Portal, which has a post office and library and general store/restaurant but isn’t actually incorporated. We wandered around the town (1 block?) and stopped at some feeders. It seems quite common for residents to set up feeding stations, put out benches and ... read more

Today was another incredible hot bright sunny blue sky sort of day. We drove to the East half of the Saguaro National Park, again getting there before it opened. It was CROWDED with bike-riders! Guess they try to get it in before the heat of the day. We did a 1 miles hike out to a lime kiln ruin and a mile back, and saw just one black-throated sparrow and 2 small unidentified birds, possibly gray vireos. All in all we preferred the other half of the National park. We are very grateful for our senior's free pass to the parks too. The mountains nearby were pretty, and the saguaro cactus varied. We learned to recognize a few types, including the “fish hook” cactus. We shall have to research if the Native Americans used the thorns ... read more