Tucson, Scene 1

We now sit at my cousin's house on the northwest side of Tucson. Actually he doesn't live IN Tucson but that's his address. This is Jim and Joyce Park I speak of. He is my uncle Ken's son. Not only are we sitting here at his house, we are sitting here in the snow. Yes, snow! Well, not very much of it but enough to definately call it snow. Rather slushy and mostly gone by now. The hills across the little valley are covered. The storm will be gone by tomorrow and the weather guy says it will be 71 degrees by next weekend. Hope so.

We arrived in Desert Hot Springs a couple weeks ago in a strong wind and left a week ago in a strong wind. It sort of blew us in and blew us out. We traveled down the east side of the Salton Sea to an RV place called the Fountain of Youth. That would have been the place to hang out all winter and get youthful again but we looked around and the people didn't look very youthful so figured it didn't work very well. They had a few nice hot tubs and pools and we did our best to make use of them. They have an interesting system -- no reservations. You either get there early in the snowbird year or you wait in the overflow camping until a vacancy comes up. Every afternoon at 2:00 they have vacancy call in front of the office. We knew we weren't going to stay that long so we didn't bother but were told it could take 4 or 5 days to get a spot with hookups. We worked our way down to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in the very south of Arizona -- south of Ajo. It was fantastic. They have a big campground with level concrete pads right in the middle of all the cactus. There were no hookup but we only paid $6. One time we paid $45 for a place that wasn't even close to being that nice (except it had hookups).

We drove a 21 mile loop road that show-cased the most beautiful scenery with jillions of different cactus. Organ pipe cactus is 4 to 8 feet tall and grows in a bunch from the base. It is mainly in Mexico and this is the only place where it grows in the US. If we had known it would be so much fun we would have planned to stay longer. But had plans to be at Jim and Joyce's by early Saturday afternoon. One of their granddaughters was celebrating her birthday at a steak house called Pinnacle Peak. It is in a small western-themed "town" (off one of the main streets in Tucson) with street entertainment going on in the evening. It was fun and the food was good. And the sherrif caught the bad guys.

Jim and Joyce attend Casas Adobes Baptist Church so we went with them Sunday. It is large but they are attracted to it because it has a very active missions program. Jim and Joyce were Wycliff Bible Translaters in Surinam South America and are still working for Wycliff in the US. One of the ministries they have is serving lunch after church so we stayed for the meal. For $7.50 for the two of us, Joyce and I had a great meal of more than we really needed. I'm sure it is a lot of work to pull this off every Sunday but it is also the food venue for the school Casas sponsors.

So we are here in Tucson for awhile, come rain or snow or sleet or gloom of night. Unless there is too much snow!!! Our house has wheels you know! This where our world is expanding to. How about yours? Maybe it is the pastor in me but I notice churches everywhere we go. While we were driving through all those cactus in Organ Pipe I noticed there is even a church in the desert. Check out the next blog.