March 23 and 24

Yesterday was a very relaxing day with Opa gone. Well, maybe not so much because he was gone, more because I spent the day at the outdoor Arizona Desert Museum. Strolled through the desert plant exhibits, the hummingbird aviary, the desert animal area and the aviary with the other birds. Some plants were just starting to bloom thanks to the rain we had Monday. I was there early enough for the first raptor show - ravens, a great horned owl, a falcon, two hawks - and hours later I was just heading to my last section, the cactus garden, when they started the second raptor show - a family of five more hawks. It was awesome to see them soar and dive through the air. Thanks to my red cowboy hat I didn't even burn to a crisp after 5 hours in the sun!
I made lots of photos of plants and animals. This one is now my favorite cactus. It's a prickly pear or pancake cactus of sorts and I already forget the official name - so here's my request: please think up a good common name for this one and put it in the comments or email it to me!

Tuesday afternoon I had already checked out the pool and the hot tub, and Wednesday after I got back from the museum I went for another float in the pool to cool off. Lovely. I sat outside, added Gila woodpeckers to my bird count, and watched two cactus wrens work on their nest in a cholla. But I don't want to make y'all jealous...

Packed the RV up again after dinner, and picked Opa up from the airport. The plane was a little delayed, until about 1 AM. That made for a pretty short night.
We got on our way by 9:30 this morning for a good long stretch of progress along rte 10. Opa drove the morning shift, Arizona and a bit into New Mexico; and after lunch I took the afternoon section - through the rest of NM, through El Paso and into Texas - while Opa fielded emails and phone calls. This worked excellent. He is now back at the steering wheel for the last piece. The landscape has varied from the Sonoran desert with the saguaros etc, to drier and drier desert areas with more yuccas and what they call creosote bushes. The Continental Divide was a large almost flat part of the desert - 4585 feet above sea level. Flat as it looks, there are always washes and ridges in the ground and mountain ridges along the horizon, so it's not boring at all. For fifteen minutes we drove a piece where we could see the Rio Grande glitter in the distance, and then we headed up through a pass between mountains made up of rocky boulders. All the same, it's repetitive enough that I might as well be entering a blog post...
The second photo is from the border of Arizona and New Mexico, where there are huge balancing boulders. The lady underneath the red hat is me.