Thanksgiving & Beyond

Last Summer, I was pretty lazy about blogging, but I plan to do much better this winter.  My last post was only six days ago and we were getting ready for Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, we hope you all had as great a Thanksgiving as we did. On Thanksgiving Day, we had a very nice dinner here in the park’s main activity hall. There were seven tables set up with 12 people signed up per table.

Each table was treated as a separate dinner/meal, and each person at the table brought an item to share. Of course we had to have a taste of everything that was brought at our table, and even though we thought we were just taking a small amount, we were stuffed.  The picture below is just a small amount of what was brought for our table.

The photo below is my dinner.  Notice that gorgeous bottle of red wine!  That's from my brother-in-law's vineyard "Terra Nativa" in Boise, Idaho.  Oh so good!!!

We ate at 1 pm and thankfully had the rest of the afternoon to wear it off. We missed being with our kids, but were very happy to have had a quality phone call with each of them before we headed off to eat. We couldn't have asked for a better day!  It was sunny and topped off at 81 degrees.

On Friday, we took the Wrangler out Jeeping with the same group we were out with last week. This time, we drove close to an old mine called "The Golden Bell," but the road ended before we got there. We did get within .17 mile of it and could see the mine tailings, but since the road was blocked and washed out, we couldn’t get closer.  You can see some of the mine tailings in the photo below.  Ken took this picture with his iPhone and I zoomed in on it, so the quality is not the best.

These next two photos show some of us heading back out to the main road.

What was I saying in my last post about Arizona having no rain?  Well Arizona is still way behind in its annual rainfall, but some parts of the state got rain this weekend (they had snow in Flagstaff). Queen Valley got a bunch of rain on Sunday, and we even had thunder and lightning. Ken & I were south of Queen Valley picking up some Cholla stalks earlier in the day and noticed some heavy clouds over the mountains. It was nice and sunny where we were at, so really didn’t pay much attention to it.  See, it looks like some rain, but nothing to really worry about....

After getting the Cholla stalks, we decided to drive back into Apache Junction to put fuel in the Wrangler and give it a good wash. Big mistake!  We really should have know better.....everytime we wash one of the Jeeps, it rains.  Sunday was no different!!  On our way back to Queen Valley, this is what we saw.  Those previous dull gray clouds had turned much darker!!  See the darkest part?  That is where we were heading (yikes).

As we got closer we started feeling the wind (lots of it) then we saw the lightning and heard the thunder. By the time we were at the coach, it was raining hard.  It was very dark out, but it was only 2 pm.  Thankfully, the heaviest wind and rain didn’t last long.  But it did drizzle on for a while.

At 4:15 we headed out to dinner with friends and drove 18 miles east to the town of Superior for pizza.  When we got back home. the only sign of the rain was a few puddles in the road.