Russ and Kappys' Adventure 2017

Last Night in Congress BLM Yep, woke up in the desert, nothing but prickly pear and sand around us and voila -- 4 hours later we are in the bustling city of Las Vegas.  Talk about shell shock! The trip was uneventful.  Another beautiful journey through this picturesque country of ours.  We arrived at Nellis AFB where we are privileged to say because of Russ' military career at about 2 pm.  First things first, did the laundry.  Then, we laundered ourselves.  Nice showers, beautiful space -- $22 a night.  Because it is Russ's Birthday, I took him out to dinner at the Texas Roadhouse restaurant which, if you haven't experienced, is quite a bit like Joe's Crab Shack.  All of the servers are actors/actresses.  The place is run so efficiently and it really is a fun place to eat.  They certainly move you in and out of there quickly.  The name of the place would suggest that the corporation that owns it is located in Texas but a qui...

Today we spent a bit of time in the past.  After a morning run with my dog, we traveled by bicycle about 1/4 mile from our campsite where happens to be the "Pioneer Cometary."  In this graveyard there are many graves, most of them unmarked but for the indigenous stones placed around them.  There were a few that had headstones and they seemed to be predominately children.  Seems like infant mortality was quite rampant out here on the desert.  As you can see by the picture below there were many graves, all organized in rows. One particular unmarked grave gave us pause as someone had placed a child's toy on it, perhaps as a Christmas gift.  It had obviously been left in its box and the box had melted away. After cleaning up, we headed into town and visited the Wickenburg Desert Caballeros Western Museum.  If you ever get to this town, this is a must see.  Lots of original Frederick Remington sculptures and beautiful paintings. ...

Well it has been a few days since I posted and there are two reasons: 1) Been laying low at Roosevelt Lake; and 2) No cell service. We left our plugged in existence in the Indian Casino parking lot on Saturday morning (3/23) and headed out to Roosevelt Lake.  This is an area between Tucson and Phoenix -- to the north.  The lake is a reservoir formed by Roosevelt Dam which was built in 1920 or so.  At the time it was the largest stone dam ever built.  This was accomplished by block and tackle and overhead cables swinging indigenous dressed stone blocks into place to form a wall.  Yesterday we explored the dam and here are a few pictures. The updated dam  In this picture, if you look close enough, you can see the original blocks at the bottom of the wall.  Amazing! The Dam from the Lake side We were thinking about taking the Apache Trail from the Dam down the canyon to Phoenix but after further investigation in our trailerless truck, dec...

We decided to stay another day in this god-for-saken parking lot because we wanted to check out Fort Apache.  Remember Cornelia from last night?  She told us to go there.  Boy I am glad we did.  The 75 mile one way trip was totally worth it.  Who knew we would be crossing a canyon? Once we navigated that, we arrived 2 hours later at Ft. Apache, which if you didn't know, was a fort set up to protect white settlers from Indians back in the 1870's.  The place is located on the White River Apache Reservation (this is where Cornelia and her family live),  has been well taken care of and there is even a private and public school for the local children.  General Crook's Residence Inside General Crook's Residence While we were walking through the fort, we met a fellow who teaches at the private school in Fort Apache (sponsored by the Lutheran Church).  We asked him if the children who graduated from these schools went onto co...

So we went over to the casino for dinner and while the food was adequate, the service,  the culture and company was wonderful.  Russ and I sat at a table 90 degrees from a family of Native Americans.  I wondered what their story was so I finally got up, introduced myself and asked how many generations were represented.  After counting, they came up with 5.  I asked if I could take their picture and this is what I got. The older lady's  name was Cornelia and her Daddy had been 4 times the Tribal Chairman of the White Mountain Apaches.  She regaled us with her claim to fame which had been her journey to Washington D.C. to get water rights for her tribe -- which she won.  She was also on the board of the Apache Cultural Museum in Ft. Apache. What an honor to meet her and her family.

Yes, we broke camp this morning early and began our journey north towards home.  We traveled along a two lane highway -- 70 -- where there was not much traffic but tons of wildflowers. And Beautiful Vistas  Look at these Poppies! As we traveled along the highway we entered an Apache Reservation and Russ and I were both struck by how sad their little towns and ranches were.  Something is definitely wrong here when the original inhabitants of this beautiful country are not proud enough to live better than what we see here.  I don't know what the answer is or who is to blame (that doesn't matter anyways), but somehow all people need to be lifted up!  We owe it to people like this: We are camped tonight at a Native American Casino.  $28 with our Good Sam Pass -- just a parking lot to hook up to water, electricity and dump.  Going to go to dinner at the Casino -- tomorrow we press on to Roosevelt Lake.

I made it up this morning and took Ceilidh on a 3 mile run up the road from our campsite.   Then enjoyed breakfast before setting out to visit The Chiricahua National Park.   Here’s another unimaginably beautiful piece of land that we citizens own.   Amazingly the park was pretty full – there are a lot of traveling seniors like us out there.   The camp ranger was very helpful in pointing out the route we should take to see most of the really cool things.   I was also able to get in a little 2 mile hike   The park celebrates the geological formations that have come to be by virtue of an erupting volcano many thousands of years ago.   Apparently the ash from that eruption has compacted into what we see as these beautiful “hoodo” looking structures.   There are quite a few of these structures that have been named:   Sea Captain, China Boy, Organ Pipe Formation, but the most impressive one was the profile of Cochise’s reclin...

This morning we shared breakfast with our friends who were scheduled to head to Mexico for dental work.   We had home cured bacon and eggs scrambled up with everything in them but the kitchen sink.   We said our goodbye’s and took off for a part of Arizona that we had not previously visited.   Located in the Southeastern corner of the state, real close to the Mexican border, we set out to visit the Chiricahua National Monument.   We had wanted to camp in the park but there are only 24 sites and naturally, all of them had been reserved.   Tomorrow we will go see what the big draw is here, so far away from civilization. We had a couple of free campsite places figured out and we decided upon this one located a couple miles south of the park.   It was looking kind of iffy as we drove along, following the directions from our Allstays app (which apparently is gps based because it knows where we are even though we have zero cell service). ...