When we left
Holbrook, AZ we went through Winslow to stop at the Flying J Truck Stop to fill
up with fuel before we settled in for the winter in Mesa. From Winslow we took AZ 87 south. There is beautiful scenery along most of this
route, but sometimes the road looks like it goes on forever going nowhere. This area is actually the beginning of the
Coconino National Forest even though there are no actual trees to be seen.
Further
along the trees become evident.
Although
this is a beautiful drive, I have to admit it bothers me because of all the
steep declines and long, long inclines.
This particular decline was 6% with a curve at the end for added
apprehension on my part. I might note,
Greg doesn’t have the same apprehensions as I do, he’s just driving along doing
his thing and I’m worrying enough for both of us.
I liked the
way the sun was shining through the trees and adding some interesting shadows.
More of the
scenery through Coconino.
Just as we
come out of Coconino National Forest we enter Tonto National Forest. This area seems to have even more curves.
This one is
particularly interesting. Luckily we’ve
never met anyone in the middle of this curve.
The Tonto
National Forest seems to be more mountainous with a dense covering of trees.
In spite of
what this sign and others like it say, we still haven’t seen any wildlife on
our trips out here – I don’t think the little lizard we saw last year really
counts. I guess we can count our lucky
stars we haven’t had to face a collision with an elk, I hear it can be pretty
bad.
This is one
of the downgrades. Even though this
drive makes me nervous we hear from people who have done it that the route down
through Show Low is even worse.
And, this is
one of the inclines showing up on the right.
Makes me nervous just looking at the picture.
The saguaro
cactus are starting to show up, means we are almost to our winter home.
We arrived
Sunday afternoon and it’s been a busy week so far. Greg has been cleaning the coach, the outside
windows and the Jeep. The Kansas dust
storms left us with a lot of cleaning to do.
I worked today on the inside of some of the cabinets, ran the sweeper
and mopped. We’ve managed to square
dance twice so far this week and will be going again tomorrow. We are back on our low-calorie, low sodium
diet with considerations added for kidney health (Greg would prefer no more
kidney stones). So, I’m spending quite a
bit of time working on our meal plans and keeping track of what we eat – so far
so good but it’s only been four days.
Yesterday we
went to the grocery across the street for a restock, it was Senior Citizens Day
and we get 10% off. There is an Osco pharmacy
in the store so we decided we would get our flu shots which also gives us each
a coupon for 10% off on future grocery purchases. The pharmacist talked to us about the new pneumonia
vaccine, Prevnar 13 so we decided to get that also, this also gave us two more
10% off coupons (this is easier than clipping coupons and Medicare covers it
all). Greg suggested while we were in
the waiting area that since we already had our coupons why not just leave. I made him stay, we got one shot in each arm
so last night both of us were kind of hurting, especially from the Prevnar
shot. Today we are fine. The pharmacist said people over 65 should now
have two pneumonia shots, the one we got right after we turned 65 and now the
Prevnar 13 shot. The Prevnar shot is a
once in a lifetime event so I encourage all of our friends over 65 to get
theirs.
We start
work on Monday. We think our schedule
will be Monday and Tuesday, five hours each per day. Our mail still goes to our South Dakota
address and we get it once a month. But,
if anyone needs to get anything to us quicker they can use our Arizona address
until April – 233 N. Val Vista Drive, Site 796 V, Mesa, AZ 85213.
