Out Into the Desert

We made our third and fourth trip to get groceries today. I think now we've got pretty much everything replaced and should be able to eat well at home for a while. The third trip was to get specific ingredients for planned meals. The fourth was to see if another store had the few things the other didn't. We tend to get in the habit of going out to eat, just like we did when we worked. Sometimes it makes sense if we're out sightseeing and will be gone at mealtime. However, I know from a health standpoint as well as from the financial aspect, we are better off preparing our meals and eating at home. I looked through some new recipes I received from a friend today, and picked out a few that looked interesting. We have the ingredients now, so we'll try to do better about eating at home!

When we got back from the grocery, Sandra was ready to go. Last night in the RV-Dreams chat room, we'd talked about going out to the desert to find a geocache. We loaded up with our cameras, water, the GPS unit, our hats and walking sticks, and set out. The RV park we are staying at is right on the edge of the desert. There are miles and miles of trails that are well-marked and pretty easy to walk. It was a good walk, but we weren't able to get to the geocache. One of the things about geocaching, is just having the location set into a GPS doesn't mean you can get to it directly from where you are. In this case, there is a fence that prevented us from getting to it. Sandra showed me where there's a break in the fence, quite a ways west of where we needed to be. I will look on Google Earth and see if I can determine if there is a trail on the other side of the fence that will lead us closer to the cache. Otherwise, we should be able to get to it from a picnic ground parking lot off of Kinney road, which is several miles east of this RV park.

This is the view looking west from where we figured out we weren't going to be able to get to the cache. From this vantage point, we are about a mile and a half from the RV park.



This is looking north towards where the cache is hidden.


Here's Sandra, as we got ready to head back to the RV park.



I didn't get a very good picture, but you may be able to see two little ground squirrels we saw on the way back.

The desert floor is beginning to bloom. These tiny little daisy-like flowers are popping up through through the rocks in many places.



We couldn't figure out if this is someone's dear departed pet's grave, or if the RV park owner's wife is decorating the desert! But, along the trail we saw this pile of rocks with this artificial rose sticking out of it.

It was breezy when we started our walk, and the wind increased steadily all afternoon. We've had some mighty gusts come through, but I don't think we've blown to New Mexico yet. With all the dust in the air, we might get a pretty nice sunset.