Monday, March 15, 2010

Arizona in the Spring

Got home yesterday from a wonderful week in Arizona. It was our first, and hopefully not our last, visit to this amazing place. I loved it! I thought I'd share a few of my photos. Above is the front garden where we stayed, the Ocotilla was just starting to turn green.
We were able to pick grapefruit for breakfast!
Saddlebrooke where we stayed is a golf community in Oracle nestled just under the Santa Catalina mountains. The first few days the mountains were skiffed with new snow....beautiful.This is an Arizona Barrel cactus in our back garden, so pretty!
The Saguaro were magnificent, like nothing else on earth. There were literally forests of these wonderful cactus minutes from our home. The weather was a bit unpredictable our first few days, so we didn't venture too far off the beaten track. We even had wet snow when we were at 4000 feet elevation! That I must admit was not fun as I was wearing sandles....
The fruits were still on some of the cactus and were still colourful.
We spent a fun day in Tombstone Arizona and really got a taste of the 'Old West', a very hard place for a woman to live. Seems that the life expectancy was short and the life was hard.Boot Hill is the graveyard in Tombstone where the unclaimed or poor were buried. It was fascinating....you really took your life in your hands if you ventured into this part of Arizona in the 1850-1890's. There were 250 graves there and the stories were fascinating.
The final highlight of our trip was a baseball game. This is called the 'Cactus League' and it is the spring training camps for the Major League Baseball teams, the game we saw was between the Colorado Rockies and the San Francisco Giants. We did it all - hot dogs, peanuts and beer....what a hoot!

4 comments:

Susan said...

What a beautiful place! I can hardly wait to hear all about it.

Glad the weather held and wasn't as bad as was predicted!

Susan

charlotte said...

Great pictures! It must be simply wonderful to pick grapefruits right off the tree, and to see all those cactuses in real life - although it looks a bit scary to have cactuses in the backyard. Not the place for bare-foot walks!

Theresa said...

Great pictures! Sounds like a perfectly wonderful trip. If the odl west intrigued you, you two migght like Deadwood, available on Netflicks, but the language is...colorful, so be warned. It's a gritty series but one of my favorites

Life Looms Large said...

That looks like a great trip! I love Arizona. (Although I know that Arizona natives are starting to brace for the summer heat...which my northern blood would have a tough time with!)

I love grapefruit. Picking them off the tree sounds so much better than buying them at the store!

Glad you had fun and glad we got to see pics!

Sue