Today – Presidents Day, February 20 – we are in Tucson, AZ in the Gilbert Ray Campground which is adjacent to the Museum of the Desert and Old Tucson. As you can see it is really camping in the desert.

I have spent this morning being Mr Fixit. I had to tighten the rear medicine cabinet door again as the screws keep working loose. I may have stopped that with the infamous toothpick trick, we shall see. Our friends noted that I had a backup light that was out, so I replaced the bulb. In Falcon SP we had a bee problem. They invaded our Fantastic Fan (for the non RVers this is a very quiet, very powerful ceiling exhaust fan). I thought I had eliminated them by running the fan on high. It did get rid of most of them, but it left behind a fair amount of bee parts on the fan blades, also the I had not cleaned the screen, ever. All is now spotless. One of these days I will tackle the nonfunctioning connection to the running lights on the car. I have dealt with that by not running after dark and if I had to I turned on the car lights and ran the battery down a bit.

Retracing our route through Texas: we left Seminole Canyon Historic SP on the 12th and made our way to Davis Mountain SP just outside of Fort Davis and about 18 miles from McDonald Observatory which we visited last year. WOW! This park is located in a canyon with an amazing Inn at the far end, Indian Lodge. It was constructed by the CCC in the ‘30’s and after a period of neglect in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s it has been restored to the original standard. The campground is quite lovely with roomy, fairly level sites and all the hookups you could want.. The thing to see here is the Montezuma Quail. We never did see any, I guess they heard about Cheney and all went into hiding. We did see many other birds and the deer were in the campsites begging for food. We obeyed the law and did not feed them, although others were totally ignoring the law. We drove up the Skyway Drive and left the car at the top to hike on over to historic Fort Davis. The altitude changes were fairly significant and when we reached an overlook with this view we decided that it would not look any better from up close and turned around to return to the car. Along the way I had turned an ankle which is still sore, but not so sore asa to slow me down any.

While in Davis Mountain we learned that Dan Rather was coming to Marfa, 26 miles away, to pull the switch to turn on a new Public Radio Station, MPR (Marfa Public Radio) 93.5 should you ever be in the vicinity. We did not run down to that, but we did by tickets to a benefit concert being given by Willie Nelson in Alpine, 26 miles away, also 26 miles from Marfa. It was great fun although I am not sure why many of the people were there as they seemed more interested in hooting, whistling and generally being rude than paying attention to the concert, I must be out of date, I thought one went to hear the performer and enthusiastically cheer his performance.

The next day we headed on out toward Tucson, but with a planned stop in Las Cruces, NM. We called ahead to Leora Zeitlin and Stuart Kelter, Leora is Zvi and Marianna Zeitlin’s daughter, they are close friends in Rochester. After some wine and conversation with Leora and Stuart we went to dinner at Mix, a restaurant not to be missed if you are in the area and love Pacific Rim food. I raised the subject of Shabbat service at the synagogue and they very graciously invited us to Shabbat Dinner at their home. This was a great pleasure as we have not had anyone to share Shabbat with since we left our kids in Virginia. Leora and family, Thank you again, we really enjoyed the haimish Shabbat.

On Friday we drove to White Sands National Monument, about an hour drive. The sand is so white that it looks like snow and it is only when you get out of the car that you realize it is not a winter wonderland. We decided to begin a 4 mile loop hike. Before the hike we had a picnic lunch in a park shelter. I saw a Horned Lark near the shelter and tossed a piece of tomato near it. That became our lunch time entertainment as he worried at the tomato for the next 15 or 20 minutes. We did not plan to complete the loop as we did not have the time, we decided to go as far as we could in the time allowed and then turn back. About five minutes into to the hike we were overtaken by the Ray and Darlene who were camped next to us in Sunny Acres Campground. We enjoyed having another couple to hike with and were a bit sad when we had to turn back. Shortly after we turned back the wind picked up and began to drive clouds of the white alkali sands into the air. We hurried back and got in the car for the drive back to Gee 2 so we could shower and prepare for Shabbat.

Saturday morning, early, we moved on to Tucson to join Bob and Pat Hogg for a few days.