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BEAUTIFUL.
FLEETING.
RARE.
Just the kind of thing one wishes to grasp and hang onto. My yard man and I were out on the road this evening when we saw this semicircle appear in the sky.
(He's so accustomed to stopping the car on a dime, now!)
When I hopped from the car for the picture, there were three other folks who had climbed from vehicles with cameras in hand!

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BUMP, THUMP, THUD!! It's very hard for me to come to a soft landing after a warm and wonderful vacation like the one I just took. So I was fortunate yesterday--my first day home--that there was little I had to accomplish. When invited to accompany the Little Actor and his caretakers on a hike through a local park, I was most happy to bump along the runway for a little while longer before the vacation had to come to a full stop.
















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IT WAS 105 DEGREES IN THE SHADE yesterday when the Yard Man and I left Phoenix. We had risen and dressed, and I had feverishly worked at consolidating my luggage. Both of us had gained a few items on the trip--a tee shirt or two, a book, some knick-knacks, and gifts for our dear Little Actor. That Yard Man, however, he didn't have a problem; he just stuffed everything more tightly into his one bag, sat on it and pulled the zipper closed. But I knew that I had some serious rearranging to do. Along with jeans and a shirt, I put on my vest and my jacket and my sneakers--the bulkiest and heaviest clothing I had with me. My bag of rocks, you see, was taking up more space than I could spare, and weighing me down.

I knew there would have to be some eliminations. So into the motel sink I dumped all the rocks, and got them wet to show their best colors. Hmm, I pondered which ones I could possibly part with, and, oh, it was tough!
Finally I picked out ONE that I thought I could leave behind.

(But now I'm begging of you, Dear Reader. If you happen to pass the Comfort Inn on Black Canyon Highway in Phoenix, please do me a favor. Go right on up to the third floor room, 351, and get me that pretty red rock that I left on the railing outside the door. I'd be ever so grateful!)








I staggered through two airports with my carry-on luggage, and sweated under my layers of clothing...but the rest of those rocks made it safely home with the yard man and me...





...and my handful of black and white pebbles, too!


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SO THERE WE WERE, the Yard Man and I, heading into the sunrise for the first time in ten days! (Of course, we weren't watching its first burst of glory, but it was still climbing upward in the sky as we headed east.) And, hurray, after studying the map over breakfast, we saw we had time to meander toward Phoenix, in spite of our time-gobbling fiasco the night before!



Our return route was south of our western route, but we saw a lot of the same types of scenery and terrain as we'd seen heading west.












Every once in a while, however, we came across something entirely new (like a serpentine road that was a map of the last ten miles we had traveled), and then I'd be frantically scrambling through my camera again...throwing out earlier pictures as fast as I could to make room for the new. It became the main activity of my day. "My goodness," said the Yard Man. "We've been to so many places where you could have gotten another media card!"


"Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. It seems to me we were miles from nowhere during much of this trip!" I responded. "But, oh! Stop the car! I haven't seen purplish-pink cactus before!"










Nor had I ever before been tempted to steal an orange --in an unripe state and straight off the tree (well, never in any state, I can honestly say). But extensive groves of citrus fruit were just too much to resist. "Please pull over," I begged my Yard Man.
"Just look how beautiful! And I'll bet they ripen off of the tree! Don't you think it would be okay to pick just one? Won't you stop?" I wheedled.And do you know what he did, that Adam (ooops, I mean that man who was driving the rental car)?! He pulled right off the road and up to the tree. He made it possible for Eve to just open her window and pluck an orange!

I have to confess, Dear Reader, it's good those oranges were not really ripe. (And perhaps it's good, too, that my suitcase was already weighted down with a bag of rocks!) Yes, we got past those lovely landscapes of fruit and vegetables sans larceny of any kind!





I went back to gushing over boulders and mountains and clouds.
Oh, those clouds!
The only thing they tempted me toward was
a false belief that I'd never seen such a sight before in my life!





It was mid-afternoon by now and we'd spent a lot of time in the car.
Sure, we weren't making a beeline for Phoenix, but neither could we get out and lollygag a lot.

It didn't much matter, there was no place to stop! That's right, there was no place at all to stop. Even the Yard Man was getting nervous when the low level gas light came on and we heard the warning 'ding.'
It was still umpteen miles to the nearest little pinpoint spot on the map that signified human activity!


Then, what do you know? Out of the barren expanse popped a shopping center! Yes,
'Salome Shopping Center,' so said the sign.
We could buy gas! (The Yard Man and I, we both breathed a sigh of relief, because--it wasn't quite like locking the keys in the trunk--but without any gas, we'd have been loitering in the desert until even the clouds lost their charm!)





We eagerly entered the shopping center
(first point of interest in fifty miles)...and
were quite enthralled! Offered for sale were: bananas, balloons, hula-hoops, garden hose, toilet tissue, ice trays and a vacuum cleaner...all in the very same aisle! And that's not all:















If one needed a little statuette, right there they were, along with the bread and the plastic flowers!









The aisles were tiny and cramped, but the shelves overflowed with most anything one could be after!

(Except for one thing, of course. "Ha!" I said to the Yard Man, "find me a media card!")







Back in the car, we chattered about the fascinating shopping center for miles.
And miles and miles.
And then we came to the tiny town of Wickenburg, where we just missed the Visitor's Center and museum (closed at 5:00, like everything else of note). But, aha, we did get something to eat at a great little Mexican restaurant where our meal was so delicious, we wolfed it down, thus eating up the last of our western vacation!



(Except for the final short stretch into Phoenix--where we spent the night, and prepared for take-off).











Adios!


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EUREKA! THE PACIFIC!




It was mid-morning yesterday when the Yard Man and I got to San Juan Capistrano, situated on the tip edge of the country, overlooking the left-side ocean. I have to say--it was a fabulously warm and sunny mid-morning! For ever so long we simply sat on a rock jetty that stretched out into the ocean; it gave us a perfect view of surfers (who spent most of their time waiting for the perfect wave [as I waited for a perfect picture of that perfect wave, with them riding perfectly atop!] The Yard Man was doing his best to aid in
the picture procurement:


"Are you ready? Here comes a good wave!...Ooops, no, they didn't like that one."
"Oh, there's one waaay out that's lookin' good...nope, they didn't want that one."

"Wow, I bet they'll try to ride this one that's coming...get ready!"










I could have enjoyed doing nothing else all day, but we wanted to see the town, and the old Spanish mission--the one made famous by swallows, you know. Hmm, Dear Reader, my eyebrows are raised; DO you know? (It's okay if you don't have all the details in your head...here you go).





















This mission was founded in 1776, and there's lots of original architecture to see. In fact, the oldest building in California that's still in use is the chapel right here on the grounds. There are lovely gardens, too. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was another picturesque photo op. So we lingered a while, until my camera was saying "I'm stuffed! "I'm stuffed!" every time I tried to take a picture. (Really crying, "Media card full! Media card full!) Oh, I found it so painful to have to go back and purge that card of earlier photos in order to squeeze in more!












So we left the mission. We spent some time browsing through shops in the charming little downtown area, but before long we heard the ocean calling us back.








We drove south a bit to another spot on the edge. The beach here was made up of pebbles--pebbles that had me murmuring superlatives and wishing to dump the clothes and shoes and toiletries out of my suitcase (not to mention the sizable bag of rocks I'd already squirreled away in there) and tote home enough of them to make my own little San Juan Pebbly beach in the bathtub!


And, ah! (gasp) Look at this gorgeous, exotic seaweed! I'd like some of that, too, for my bathtub beach.

As I gathered up (a mere handful of) pebbles and prepared to leave the ocean, I commented to the Yard Man how the eastern ocean and the western ocean each have their own unique beauty. "Well," he said, "and you've seen them both in the last two weeks!" We stopped to calculate and found it to be true--two weeks ago to the day I arrived at the OBX and that beautiful right-side ocean!

But now the sun was dropping to the horizon. It was time to do a one-eighty and say goodbye to all oceans. As we turned to head for the car, a whistle blew; a very loud whistle! Before we could say, "Of course! A train! How could a day in the west go by without hearing a train?!" it had streaked on by.



(We were slightly horrified by a speeding train on a beach! But even more horrified by
our sudden change of good fortune...for you see, Dear Reader, in the interest of full disclosure,   the following two hours of traveling east could be termed a DIABOLICAL DENT in our vacation. What we planned to do was get a head start on our journey eastward, a pleasant hour or two of driving before it got fully dark, stopping for a nice dinner en route. The DD: Rain, which started up as we left the coast, making the sky prematurely dark and gray; Friday night rush-hour traffic on all roads (We weren't that far from Los Angeles, after all), making the decision about exactly WHICH route would allow us to move along faster than fifteen miles per hour a tricky and difficult one; Teeth-grinding and route-switching and accusations. Arrrrgh. Two hours later we'd progressed thirty miles. And two hours later we'd regressed twice that much in our spirits and good will toward each other, and were going without dinner! It wasn't 'til this morning that we shook off the chill of that big old DD. We agreed that all dents needn't be diabolic, and vowed we'll keep our wits about us next time!)

Hey, hey, and we've still got a day of vacation left!
And it's another bright sunny day!
(You'll hear about it manana)


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