5/28/2015

Fun in Arizona part 2

So, on with the vacation...

In checking through the guidebooks, we noticed that Fort Apache was not far from where we were staying. Naturally, it was a spot my husband was interested in visiting, so off we went.

There are a number of old buildings from the old fort, along with a Visitor's Center and Museum, and a school for the local tribes.



This was an original building, the Adjutant's Office, which is now a post office.


This is the school. There are also boys and girls dorms, the home lived in by an early commanding officer, the remains of the barracks, and a number of other buildings, many of which were later additions. Of course, by this time, the fort no longer has its protective walls. An interesting visit.

After the 4th, the campground cleared out pretty quickly, and for the rest of our time there, there were probably at most 10 sites that were in use. Of course, part of the time, the lower camping loop was out of use because of a big water leak in the line. Only a few stalwarts in RVs stayed there, due to the fact that they had to haul in water if they wanted it.






There was a walking trail near the lake that we went on one morning, before it got too hot. Nice views of Lake Lymon.





We also had some other campers in our site. It was fun watching them at work.






Sunrise came early, and was beautiful.





One thing that we noticed a couple of times when we came back from playing tourist elsewhere was that some of our tent stakes were up out of the ground. We weren't sure what was going on with that, if some of the other campers' kids were doing it for fun, or what. We ended up staking those lines down by tying the cords around some big rocks.

On our last afternoon there, we'd decided to spend time at the campsite to get a little rest before traveling home the next day. It was unusually hot even for there, and we eventually retreated to the tent to try to nap. It was monsoon season, and there were clouds building up around us, promising to bring the temperatures down to a more reasonable level. (Monsoon simply means 'seasonal'. It doesn't specifically denote to torrential rains they get in India and elsewhere.) The rain finally started, a light sprinkle, then a little heavier. And a bit heavier. And then the straight-line winds hit. With us inside the tent. I'm not sure how long they lasted, but I'm really, really glad that we'd staked out the tent on the side the winds were coming from with really big rocks. Otherwise, we and everything in the tent would have gone rolling off down the hill and across the campground, ending up no telling where. The wind was so strong that it was blowing rain up under the tent fly into the tent, and through the gap where the zipper pull met the other zipper pull on the back window. After that, we knew how the tent stakes had gotten pulled up before.

Our last night there, a bunch of people showed up in the campsite across the one-way road from our site. Some arrived early to set up, others arrived later in the afternoon. The campground rules were that there was supposed to be quiet time past 10 pm and before 7 am. These people chose to ignore that, and were extremely loud until nearly midnight. They also chose to ignore the fact that there were young children in nearby sites and loaded their very loud speech with a lot of curse words. The next morning, when their next nearest neighbors were packing up to leave, which happened somewhere between 5:30 and 6:30, that family and their kids made a lot of noise, slamming and banging things as they packed all their stuff back into their RV. We were already up and packing ourselves, and felt like applauding them.

On the trip to and from Arizona, we noticed a lot of these.



You might have to click to get a bigger image on that one. There were miles and miles of these, many thousand individual wind turbines, in Texas, and some in Oklahoma. I've seen one or two locally, but never on this scale. I guess that's what a wind farm is.

In my next post, I'll tell you something about the area where Patty's family lives.

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