Bearizona Wildlife drive-through Park, Williams, AZ

Bearizona

May 20, 2019

Bearizona is a drive-through wildlife park in Williams, AZ. Thr is a 3 mile drive to see North American animals along with a stroll through Fort Bearizona to see other smaller animals up close and personal. These are just a few of the photo we took.

The bear is wearing Dick's hat

Black bear having a snack

white bison loosing his winter coat

fox

Javalina having lunch

owl

never saw a turkey like this one

The Grand Canyon

May 19, 2017

What a great day. We woke up to find a layer of snow on everything. This is a rare site to us desert dwellers.

Add caption

The snow didn't last long and we had a beautiful sunny day to see the Grand Canyon. Because it  was our 16th anniversary we decided to make it a really fun day so we took the train up. The train cars are all refurbished cars from many years ago. They buy up all the old cars they can find and either refurbish them or use them for the parts that are no longer available. 

It's a 2 1/2 hr trip up to the Grand Canyon and they entertain you with music, jokes and other fun entertainment.

There was a family from Germany with 2 small children on the train with us. The father spoke good English so we talked with him about his visit to the US. Foreigners love to come and see our National Parks and this family was taking 6 weeks to tour the coast of CA and some of the parks. When they came back on the train for the trip back to Williams they were totally in awe of what they had seen. The husband said, "America IS great". Nice to see the National Park through the eyes of someone from another country.

This is the bottom of the canyon where people who hike down there end up. Wish I could do that hike.

This little squirrel was so cute. He was a great beggar and would go right up to people's food and either stand up and beg or just go right to what he wanted to eat. He wasn't timid at all and people were grabbing up their food before he got into it.

On the train on the way back we were ROBBED. It was awful. Masked bandits came right onto the train and stole our money.





It was a great day and a memorable anniversary

Weekend in NY

May 11-15, 2017

I was able to fly to NY to spend Mother's Day with Chris. We had a great time visiting the Bronx Botanical Garden to see the Chihuly glass exhibit, saw a play on Broadway and ate at plant based restaurants we wanted to try out. The only own side is all the subway steps just killed my aging and out of shape legs. On the last day we resorted to taking a cab home.

The Manhattan sky line view from Chris's apartment

Chris made me a delicious breakfast for Mother's Day

2017 RV Journey

We left Lake Havasu on April 24, 2017 and traveled to Tuscon, AZ. Our new (to us) truck pulled like a champ and the animals quickly

settled down and slept through most of the trip. We settled into the RV park at Davis Monthan Air Force Base for 5 days. The sites were large and most of the snowbirds had gone home so the park had lots of empty spaces. While we were in Tuscon we visited the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It's ranked the #1 Tuscon attraction.t gallery, It's a 98 acre unique experience with a zoo, botanical garden, aviary, cave, etc. There are 2 miles of walking paths through various dese habitats. There are 230 animal species, 1200 type of plants and 56,000 individual specimens.

There's a bear taking a nap 

All kinds of cactus

Lots a lots of saguaros

The saguaro flowers are so pretty

This is a unique and rare saguaro, kind of a freak of nature but so very pretty

Davis Monthan Air Force Base.....Pima Air and Space Museum

There is a BIG museum with many US and some foreign airplanes and other things that fly. You can take a bus tour of the "Bone Yard"where retired planes are stored. Some are refurbished and put back in service and others are used for parts. There are 4 sq miles of hundreds of planes.

airplanes lines up in the field

Navy Orien sub chaser

Navy Corsair fighter

B29 Super Fortress

skeleton of a WW ll  trainer

C-130 Hercules

white coating stuff to keep out snakes, mice and other critters that would get it and destroy the insides of the planes

Navy AWACS 

May 3, 2017  Bisbee, Arizona

Bisbee was founded as a copper, gold and silver mining town in 1880.   But, by 1950, mines were closed and the population of Bisbee had dropped to less than 6,000. In 1975 the Phelps Dodge Corporation halted its Bisbee copper-mining operations .Bisbee Mayor Chuck Eads, with cooperation of Phelps Dodge, implemented development of a mine tour and historic interpretation of a portion of the world-famous Copper Queen Mine as part of an effort to create heritage tourism as another base for the economy. They worked to compensate for the economic loss due to the end of the mining industry in the area.

Community volunteers cleared tons of fallen rock and re-timbered the old workings. Eventually, this local effort came to the attention of the federal Economic Development Administration. It approved a large grant to the City of Bisbee to help the mine tour project and other improvements in downtown Bisbee; these were designed to meet tourist business needs. The Queen Mine Tour was officially opened to visitors on February 1, 1976. More than a million visitors, from all 50 states and more than 30 countries, have taken the underground mine tour train.

In the 1960's, due to cheap housing and attractive weather Bisbee became a destination for artists and counter culture hippies. Today there are many museums, mine tours, historic buildings turned into hotels, coffee houses and unique arts and crafts stores.

Huge open pit copper mine

Artists have painted all kinds of pretty additions to a normally unappealing wall

Add caption

 Unique guardians of the gate

Long staircase to another level of the town. That's Dick up at the top.

One of the old hotels still in use

Tombstone, Arizona