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Have you been to Bisbee, Arizona? It’s a fun little town built into steep canyon walls in the southeast corner of the state. Just downstream from Bisbee is an active open pit copper mine. Mining is what brought the white people to Bisbee and there is a great museum that tells many of the mining stories.

Bisbee is full of old brick buildings. Like many towns from that era, it suffered from structure fires and so most of it was rebuilt with brick and stone. There are lots of little shops and restaurants and lots of good music and visual art too. A person could spend days poking around in Bisbee.

The Lunatic Fringe Luthiery

Gretchen Baer car art

Here is the road trip worthy song that Jennifer and Judy performed when we visited the Luthiery:

 

 

The magnificent saguaro is an amazing plant. They stand straight without any branches or arms until they are 70 or 80 years old! The provide food for people and wildlife. Birds create cavities in them for nesting and roosting. Even after they die, they stand for a long time, continuing to provide wildlife habitat. And there are many more kinds of cacti in and around the park. The big succulents bloom in the summer while wildflowers bloom much earlier in the year. This is a place to return to time and time again.

Here are a few photos from a recent trip to Arizona. I met two friends in their RV near Phoenix. From there we went to Saguaro National Park and then to SE Arizona. It was a fun and interesting road trip.

December weather has not been ‘normal’. But what is normal anymore? Normally there would be lots of precipitation, mostly snow, and fairly mild temperatures. There was early snow and then it just got cold with a thick inversion that kept the sunshine away for the most part. The snow on the ground has begun to lose its moisture and shrink.

Lucky me, I went away for nine days to sunny Arizona and while it wasn’t particularly warm most of the time, it was pleasant for the most part. Today was the first day back so the dogs and I got out a couple of times to see what had changed while I was away. Not much. It’s not a colorful world.

Photos from Arizona will show up here in a day or two.

No matter how much a person loves the place she lives, I think it’s always good to have a change of scenery. Yesterday Marcy and I and our dogs headed south to explore some of the coulee country spread across northern Douglas and Grant Counties. We enjoyed vast views across the flat wheat land of the Waterville Plateau with constantly changing weather conditions from sun breaks to various kinds of clouds and scattered rain showers. And then there were the geologic wonders of the water-carved coulees and amazing Dry Falls, left behind by the Ice Age Floods that occurred and reoccurred thousands of years ago.

It was a good day.