New Work, and Some Thoughts About the Summer

 Steve's altar--you should see the cat jump when he plays the singing bowls!

It's that time of the winter here in the Senoran Desert that I begin to feel like one of the luckiest people alive.  I read about snow deluges in other parts of the country, while here it invariably turns into shorts and T-shirt weather every day by noon.  I have a quiet routine of getting up at sunrise, having coffee and thinking thoughts, doing artwork, selling on eBay, cooking good meals, sitting outside with a book, and being semi-social, then turning in around 9:30ish.  Life is good and simple.  
  

  
This past week our friend Janice came from Truth or Consequences, NM, to visit for about four days.  It was great!  I showed her around the area a little bit, and we played lots of games of Quiddler (a rummy-like card game, with alphabet cards, where you make words instead of runs or three-of-a-kind) and we had bonfires every night.  I decided to take a few days off from my strenuous routine while Janice was here, so it kinda felt like being at summer camp with a good friend. 

 Janice and me in front of the Beluga

Artwise (apparently not a real word 'cause it's got a squiggly red line under it), I continue to work on boxes, plus I'm painting for an April-May show at January's in Truth or Consequences.  I'm painting scenes from my own life, some pivotal moments when something inside me came alive.  Sometimes it's hard and I don't want to do it, so the mixed-media boxes are a welcome break, like going outside for recess.  

 Here's a box I made for Steve for Valentine's Day.  It's decorated inside, too, 
but that's a secret.

So, the only thing that's not going well in my life, which I haven't talked about much here in my blog, but which my closest friends know, is that my left knee is almost useless these days and I really, really need a knee replacement.  I haven't had health insurance since 2012 or so when my ex's COBRA premiums became too burdensome, and then I was turned down for insurance due to pre-existing conditions (I had arthroscopic surgery on this same knee in 2011).  I've been limping along for about 2.5 years since this knee became a debilitating problem that causes severe, chronic pain.  Now it's gotten to the point where I can barely walk, so I'm finally turning to some social services to get some help.  I'm hoping to get onto some health insurance within the next few months, probably through the State of Arizona, and eventually get this surgery done.  We'll see how it goes!

 A mixed-media wooden champagne box, with hinges and clasp

In the meantime, I think Steve and I will be staying in Arizona for the late spring and summer this year rather than going to New Mexico as we usually do when the weather is nice over there.  As I'm being considered for several programs, I'll need to maintain an Arizona mailing address and presence.  So we're thinking of heading up to Prescott!  I've only been there once, but liked the look of the place and have heard so much positive about it from other travelers.   

That's pretty much all the news.  No picture of Sonja this time--Steve rang his chimes and she skedaddled!

Staying Put Never Keeps Me From Rambling

Sly and another critter at the Arizona-Senora Desert Museum

When I last blogged a few weeks ago, my 19-year-old son Sly and I were on a camping trip to several Tucson area tourist traps. (By the way, our tickets to most of the places we visited were BOGOs because I bought a Tucson Attractions Savings Passport. If you're going to visit Tucson, you should buy one, too.)

Sly and a portion of Biosphere 2

On our penultimate day on the road, we visited Biosphere 2, north of Tucson near Oracle. Years ago, Biosphere was an experiment that had humans living in a domed environment to explore possible space colonization and ways to survive on Earth in case of environmental disaster. Due to funding and management disputes, as well as factors of "confined environmental psychology" (we used to call it "Cabin Fever" in Alaska), the experiments that involved having humans live inside the facility ended. A few years ago, the University of Arizona took over management and later ownership of the site, and now they are running experiments on climate change and other issues.

We enjoyed the tour at Biosphere 2, and it was fun to imagine what it would have been like to live there back in the day. There are several really warm, lush biomes, as well as harsher desert environments, all in one big complex. I never felt like we were getting the whole story as to why people no longer live inside the facility, but it really didn't matter. There is still a lot of interesting stuff going on there, and it's a great learning environment for both the University and visitors.

Harris hawk

After our tour, we hit Tucson's rush hour traffic to try to get to the campground in Saguaro National Park that lies west of town. We had hookups and bathrooms there, but no showers. The next morning we drove to the nearby Arizona-Senora Desert Museum, which is one of my all-time favorite places to enjoy and learn about nature. They have it all there--museum exhibits, art institute and gallery, zoo, trails, cafes, gift shops. It was all fun, but the highlight of the day was seeing a demonstration of Harris hawks in flight, sometimes so close over our heads that we were brushed by their wing feathers.

After the hawk fly-over, we headed back home to Why, where we spent the remainder of Sly's visit, mostly in quieter pursuits such as playing board games, doing jigsaw puzzles, and sitting outside reading in the afternoons. When Sly had been here for a little over two weeks, we drove up to Phoenix for his flight back to Seattle. However, this was on the first full day of the Seattle Snowmageddon, and all of the flights were canceled and it was hard to predict when Sly could get out. So I rescheduled Sly's flight to have him stay an extra week. As it turned out, this was a good plan--some parts of the Seattle area were without power for five days.

Deer, deer

The extra week also gave my ex-husband a chance to look into some resources for Sly. Within a few days after his return to Seattle, Sly started a day program in the psych ward of a hospital near his dad's home. They're making a new assessment of his condition and revising his meds, which had been giving him a lot of scary side-effects. So far, switching up the meds is making things more difficult, and Sly is also having to do a lot of hard work on issues that he'd rather not look at, but ultimately this should all help with his recovery. In the meantime, the Social Security Administration has determined that Sly is disabled and has started providing some funds, which will really help in getting Sly into a semi-independent living situation as well as funding his future healthcare needs.

Sly's painting of a blue one-eyed singer

Sly's extra week here in Arizona also gave him time to do more artwork. He finished painting some deer antlers for the neighbors, who had him over for dinner one night, where he showed their friends a painting he'd just completed and sold it on the spot! That was very encouraging. Sly has also had some sales in the past on his Etsy site, and maybe he'll be able to add more paintings there once he finishes his partial hospitalization program.

Dina in Brian's Chinooky Van

Another benefit of Sly's extended stay was that my friends Brian and Jon from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, came through and stayed with us a couple of nights in Why, so my son got to meet some of my friends and vice versa. Somehow I managed to only take a picture of Brian's dog Dina while the guys were here, rather than any photos of the guys themselves. But we had some nice meals, a campfire, time to all sit together in the sunshine, and all that good quality camping-with-friends stuff.

Since my son left, I've been really concentrating on taking care of myself. Steve and I drove up to Casa Grande, a city that lies between Phoenix and Tucson, one day so I could get my Arizona driver's license. Becoming an Arizona resident will enable me to get on a state health care program, which I need because my pre-existing knee replacement and other arthritis problems make private health insurance prohibitively expensive. I had a scary high blood pressure spike one of the last day's of Sly's visit, and I've been more aware of blood sugar issues lately than in the past, so I'm planning to call on Monday to set up a physical at the community clinic in Ajo, where they can get me started on the state program for low-income residents.

Steve and Sonja in the leather chairs

I've had a little more time for socializing since Sly went back to Seattle. It's a big arts weekend in Ajo, and our friends Arnold and Dusty have their historic house on a home tour, so they've been painting and redecorating, and last weekend Steve and I ended up with their nice old leather chairs.

The past couple of days, I've been helping our friends Clyde and Joan (silversmith and quilt designer, respectively) with their booths at the annual "Quilting in the Senoran Desert" show, and that was really fun. I saw beautiful, inspiring work and learned a lot, and got compensated for my time by getting some of Clyde's beautiful handmade jewelry as well as having a good lunch from the Oasis Cafe both days.

Now I'm ready to chill...like Sonja:

Sonja having a sit-in

Meandering East to New Mexico

Today's Sunrise at the Gallup, NM, Walmart

When I left Williams, Arizona, the Gateway to the Grand Canyon, on Wednesday morning, I planned on just taking the short drive down to Camp Verde, south of Flagstaff, and settling in for a couple of days at an RV resort where I had reservations. However, an interesting phenomenon has occurred a lot lately. I've been getting to the place I planned to stay fairly early in the day, and I still have energy, daylight, and a tank of gas, so I decide to keep going instead of settling in for the night. This happened at Camp Verde--I arrived early in the day and kept driving south to Prescott, a great little mountain town that I've wanted to go to ever since I was a high school student and knew someone going to college there.

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that there was excellent eBay shopping in Prescott, and also on the drive up and back! Lots of thrift stores, antique stores, and one particularly good vintage clothing store. I did almost as much vintage designer brand shopping in that one day as I did the whole time I was in San Francisco!

The drive down Hwy I-17 from Flagstaff to the Verde Valley was beautiful. I had wondered why anyone would name a mountainous part of Arizona "the green valley," because I have a misconception about Arizona being all desert. The Verde Valley was full of light green spring leaves popping from the trees. In fact, one of the places I stayed in this area was idyllic...right on a lazy bend of Oak Creek. The Guppy was parked right on a bank of the creek. Lovely! My neighbors and I all sat outside in the evening, reading our books and watching the water slowly flow by.


When I left the Verde Valley, I drove north on Hwy 89A through Sedona. It was incredible. I only had a chance to take pictures at one scenic viewpoint as I was approaching Sedona from the south. The most fantastic pictures could have been taken from within Sedona itself and just north of Sedona--but I was busy driving then and couldn't take photos. Sometimes it would be good to have someone riding shotgun with a good camera, or maybe if The Guppy was rigged to take photos like one of those Google Earth cars...

North of Sedona, I saw a sign for the Walnut Creek National Monument. I'd never heard of it, but I recently bought an America the Beautiful pass that gets me into just about every sort of federal recreational lands, so I stopped. I'm glad I did! It was a fascinating, more close up view of cliff dwellings than I had seen before.

Yesterday I had another one of those days when I got to my destination early and then decided to keep going. I'd planned to stay somewhere along I-40, heading east from Flagstaff to the Arizona-New Mexico border, maybe stopping somewhere around Holbrook. But I got to Holbrook in the midafternoon, stopped at a Native American owned cafe for a delicious Navajo taco, and decided to keep driving. I made it all the way to Gallup, New Mexico, and did my first night of boondocking at a Walmart! I got there around 6 pm before the lot had filled up with semis and RVs, so I got a nice little corner, where some little Airstreams later joined me.
Last night I went into Walmart and got myself a Verizon modem so I can have Internet access wherever there is Verizon 4G or 3G coverage (so long as I can plug in my laptop or its battery still has power). I used it in the Gallup (3G) area and it seemed to work fine.

Right now I'm using the free public WIFI at the Route 66 Casino just west of Albuquerque. I had no particular itinerary in mind when I left Gallup this morning. It was an extremely windy day and I saw the first sandstorm I've ever seen in my life. Keeping The Guppy on the road during gusty winds is a challenge, so I got off the freeway every hour or so to take a good break, and finally decided to get off the road for the evening when I came to this particular casino.

I've covered about 400 miles in the past couple of days...much more than I have previously been driving. Except for the wind that I experienced across New Mexico today, the driving has become easier. I have more confidence that The Guppy is going to be okay, now that she has almost 2000 miles on her new engine. There are fewer mountains--actually, plenty of mountains to look at, but fewer to have to drive up and down, since the freeway runs through the valleys and flat rangeland, so I can really get some miles behind me.

I'm also less wedded to having plans about where I'll spend each night. Now that I've boondocked a few times (although not yet anywhere really out in the boonies, such as BLM land), I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to find a decent place to stay, so I just get in the RV and drive and see where I end up. This seems to be working for me, and, as you can see from the photos, Sonja is pretty comfortable with things the way they are going right now, too!

Trip Planning Across Northern AZ and NM

(Today's pictures are from the Colorado River, the border between California and Arizona)

Today I'm at Ridgeview RV Resort in Bullhead City, Arizona. I stayed here last night and will stay again tonight. It's not much of a destination, more of a stopover, to me. The resort is just across the river from Laughlin, Nevada, where there are lots of casinos.

I had thought about going over to Laughlin just for laughs, so to speak, but when I got here to the resort, everyone was all excited because today is their yearly Bash. It's a day long event involving a pancake breakfast, a cake walk and some games, an open bar, and a chicken dinner. I decided to pay my $5 so I could eat the pancakes and chicken, but I'm not interested in the rest. Most of the participants are snowbirds who spend a good part of their winter right here at Ridgeview, so they all know each other and are having a Bash before they go home to Canada, Alaska, Michigan, or wherever. I did meet a very nice couple from British Columbia this morning over breakfast.

I spent a good part of the day using my road atlas, the Internet and a AAA tripbook to plan my route for the next couple of weeks. I want to be in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, two weeks from today to meet a couple of my online VanDweller friends. In the meantime, my itinerary looks generally like this:

• March 27-28--to Williams, AZ, and take a train day trip up to Grand Canyon
• March 29-30--Sedona/Flagstaff/Prescott area
• April 1-5--Head east to Albuquerque and Taos area, hopefully meet my online friend Bridget
• April 6-9--Head south to see the aliens in Roswell, plus maybe Carlsbad Caverns, then loop back west to meet up with my friends in Truth or Consequences.

I'm not sure how long I'll stay in TorC--a few days, I hope, before continuing the push eastward. I'm just really glad to have the opportunity to do some sightseeing and relaxing here in the beautiful Southwest. I have been here several times before, but never was so struck by how beautiful the landscapes are or how temperate the climate can be. My previous trips to the Southwest were usually a little later in the spring, during my kid's spring break from school, so it was hotter. I could really see spending significant times of the winters in desert settings--and that's part of why I'm traveling this year, is to get an idea of what sort of place or places I'd like to spend more time.

I'm sure looking forward to taking the train up to the Grand Canyon! I was so conflicted on whether to go camping up there. The daytime temps are still in the 50s this time of the year, and the night time temps can be well below freezing. I wanted to go and I didn't want to go, so much. Radical ambivalence. I finally decided to camp at the Grand Canyon Railway RV Park and take the train up for a day. It's expensive, but it will be very memorable and I know I will enjoy it.

Time to go out and spend the rest of the day in the sunshine before I join the red neck diesel pushers for a fried chicken dinner.