First Day of Summer - Brr.

or any other kids' movie

I know, I missed a weekend post. I got crabby; Michael hurt his back - it was not material worthy for a blog post. This weekend, Michael's back was still sore, but we did get out of the house. Saturday, we went to see the movie Maleficent. It was pretty good, if you overlook an obvious error in the premise... My favorite part was when Michael & I went up to the booth to buy the tickets and the cashier said really loud and rather judgmentally, "Two ADULT tickets to Maleficent." Yes, we're adults watching a kids movie without kids. What's your point?

Then Sunday we decided to get the heck out of here. It's hot! We had a great drive up to Payson, an hour away, and then east a bit to walk an easy trail along the Mogollon Rim. An hour out of town and it was in the 80s, and by the time we parked at 7,500 feet above sea level (as opposed to Fountain Hills, which is around 3,000 feet), we were seeing this - brrr!

 Aaaaaaah, the smell of ponderosa pines.

After a short jaunt, we came to the view. Not too shabby.

Rim Lakes Vista Trail is very easy, and even paved, and you can get onto it from various locations. I would really recommend this if you want to bring visitors somewhere out of Furnace Phoenix. Just pack a lunch, drive up, find a sturdy outcropping, and stuff your face while taking in the great view. There are benches here and there. It's not the most serene trail, with the road you came in on on one side of the trail, and a highway down below, but many times all you could hear was the breeze blowing through the pines. It smelled and felt soooo good.

There are a number of lakes nearby. We chose to drive a mile to Woods Canyon Lake. So that's where everyone was. All the parking and camping grounds were full and there were lots of people fishing. What's great about this lake is that no gas-powered boats or jet skis are allowed, so it was quite peaceful (if you discount the sounds of kids screaming). There is an easy trail that goes around part of the lake, but we decided to save it for another time.

It is pretty amazing to be able to drive just an hour north (if there's no traffic) and be somewhere so much cooler though. And elk. It has elk. I always wonder if anyone's told them about these crossings. This one was quite elaborate.

Our drive back involved a lot more traffic, which reminded us of why we didn't do this more often the last time we lived here. Another reminder was the occasional overheated car on the side of the road - the trip involves a very steep, hilly drive; cruise control was not happy. Then again, hills like that are when driving a Mini Cooper or Miata is the most fun - wheeeeee!





We got home (to 108 degrees) plenty in time to play with another batch of these.



This threesome came in from a different source and are older than our last group. Always cute.
If anyone in AZ is in the market for a kitty, let me know.

Baseball - Zzzzzzzz

Renee at a baseball game? You know we must have gotten free tickets (and Michael needs a guy friend) because I would rather have watched just about any sport other than baseball. Any...other....sport....  But I will attend most anything if it's free, so here I am. At least Michael knew how to bribe me.

You have to admit we had fantastic (and expensive) seats, just a couple of rows behind the dug out and really close to the pitcher and home plate. It's a shame they were wasted on me.

We were playing Atlanta.

The last time we were at a Phoenix downtown sporting event, in 2001, was for a basketball game, watching the Suns (also thanks to free tickets). The cool part was that the Diamondbacks, then a 4-year-old expansion team playing for the first time in Phoenix, had made it to the World Series. The final game of the Series was that night, and the stadiums for both sports are right next to each other. The basketball game ended before the baseball game did, with a win - yahoo! So they put the last minutes of the Series on all the big mega-screens so we could see what happened. The Diamondbacks won! The whole downtown went wild. Everyone was honking and whooping and hollering. I was half-heartedly whooping. They had beat the Yankees. I'm from NYC. If I was going to root for a baseball team, it would have been the Yankees, but it was hard not to get caught up in the local celebratory spirit. It's a good thing we did because the Diamondbacks haven't been back to the World Series since!

A side note is that as we tried to locate our free parking lot, we saw people dressed up as comic book characters. Ah yes, Comicon was in full swing. Too bad we missed the zombie walk. It reminded me of the zombie bike ride in Key West.


I lasted until the 7th inning before my boredom got the best of me. I know and understand the rules of the game, I just don't care. Immediately after our departure, Atlanta scored their winning runs, and the final score was 5 to 2.


We did figure out our next careers though.





Saturday we decided to stay cool by going to the movies. I'm not a big Tom Cruise fan, but the premise of his latest movie, Edge of Tomorrow, seemed like something worth checking out. And it was! We liked it.

We had planned on driving up to Payson for a hike on Sunday to escape the heat (already), but Michael had an attack of the sinuses and didn't want to do anything but try to sleep it off. Boo. Maybe next weekend.

A Lakeside Hike

We decided at noon to hike along the coast of Bartlett Lake (note you need a $6 Tonto Park pass to get in; the ranger's office was closed so we had to turn back and get it a Circle K 20 miles away). It's always so neat to be driving through all this brown and then see a blue or green lake come into view.

There's a beach-like place, which is really where the lake/reservoir has receded. There are also lots and lots of picnic tables (see on hill below).

Most were filled by Latinos, which made us feel like we were in Puerto Rico again. We had spent months in the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos where we never saw any locals on their beaches, and then we hit Puerto Rico (eventually) and families flocked to the beach with everything but the kitchen sink every weekend.

This lake was surprisingly not crowded. We went the wrong way to the trail first and were treated to a good view of the "beach." Honestly watching the people walk back and forth with their stuff sort of looked like buffalo migrating.

If you go to the right, you can do some minimal walking and find some nice private coves to hang out in. We will definitely do that soon. We'll just pack a small backpack cooler and some camper chairs.

Once we realized we were going the wrong way though, we turned around. It's a pretty large lake, and it too, was surprisingly not all that crowded.



Like the drive, it's so cool to be walking amidst the dry tundra and then run across blooms. I'd never seen a saguaro bloom pink before.



We were the only ones out there, so I started having the weebie jeebies about being attacked by a mountain lion. While I was in the midst of that thinking a jack rabbit jumped out of the bushes right next to us and took off. I had to make sure I hadn't soiled myself, and now Michael could stop pouting because I'd seen one once and he hadn't. We ended up scaring up two on this hike, but they were way too fast to capture on camera. We did capture a blue heron and a buzzard though.



And even better than that, we saw mule deer!  Three of them.



That really made our hike. Which started going sour not too long after that. We'd been hiking for 2 1/2 hours and were starting to get pretty hot (it was 101 degrees). The hike is supposed to be along the water, so we'd been expecting to douse ourselves off occasionally, but the lake was so far away and down cliffs now, that it didn't quite work the way we'd expected.



It was almost like walking in a quarry.

Once the trail started going away from the water, my mind and body started to lose it. I could hear my heart beating, I sort of went deaf, I started getting dizzy. Uh oh. We had water, but it wasn't helping. We turned around and decided to try to get down to the water and cool off.  An oasis. Excellent.









We still had a ways to get back. Seriously, does this look hot? It was!



We still had enough energy to play with a beach ball (two actually) we found along the coastline.



We decided to ignore the trail back, staying along the waterline all the way back. I would have loved to have known what our body temps were at the end of this trek. Jeez. Lesson: We're good in heat, but 2 hours is about our limit, this one was 3 1/2. The trail wasn't really all that tough, but going out at noon once the temps are over 90 is dumb. We still had fun though.