Not staying home again!!

Early on this morning, I decided right off that this wasn't a day for painting......  Enough of that already...  Well, I did open a can of the original white paint they used in here as builders, and was alarmed to find that it was just like water.........

Years ago we used to use white wash on the country places that was like chalk and water, and that was about the same consistency as the paint in the can.....  Sure glad we didn't ask to have the $3 K upgrade of colors........ With that crappy paint.......  Waste of money!!!  But I did touch up the brown mistakes, and it took several coats of this stuff to cover....

We decided to take a car ride, and headed out to our West and up around the North side of Pheonix....  Just buzzing around and seeing the sights...  Ended up going North on I 17 but we decided not to go all the way to Prescott, so we turned West again toward Wickenburg..

Again this is mostly out in the desert, but we did stop at the intersection by Carefree and have a Jack in the Box burger, as there were no Wendy's around.....  Once in Wickenburg we drove down the main street, but the place was deserted....

I don't know what I expected but,  since I have only been there in the early spring when all the tourists are climbing all over everything, the lack of people in the heat of summer was a surprise....

We decided to go North out of Wickenburg and head on to North Ranch Escapee RV park........  I stopped at the local quick shop and confirmed that the area had received over an inch of rain, and the streets in the park confirmed that.

The rain had washed out a lot of mud and rock from folks yards and drive ways.....  North Ranch was also quite bare of people...  Oh, there are more folks that live there during the summer, but the transient camper row was totally empty...

We drove back to the end of the park and passed by Mike and Pat McFall's home to see if the storm did them any harm..... but no they looked high and dry...

So then we decided to see if we could find Al and Kelly's new place....  All we knew was that it was on Ghost Town Road.....  We drove to the center of Congress and found the road right off...  We drove up the road until it turned to dirt..  Nope didn't see it....

So then coming back South, more slowly this time we spotted that we had driven right by it on the West side of the road....  Must have been looking East.....

There were some puddles of water left in the road on their South side but the drive was dry and solid.  The ground falls off to the back side, but I never left the driveway, as a neighbor came out into his carport on the house North of them and watched my every move....

I took a couple of pictures around the front and hopped back into the car.......  Folks around here have shootin arms and stuff, and I would want to be on the receiving end of that sort of stuff....  I did drive up to the neighbor's house to try and say hi and that I knew Al and Kelly, but he had retreated inside once I was back in the car...

The thing that also struck us was that it had been well over 100 when we were driving around Phoenix, and that in Congress it was only 90 with a nice breeze.  Its about a 1000 feet higher up there and that seems to make all the difference...

When we came back into town, we traveled down 60 toward Surprise, but chickened out before we came to town, turning down the new bypass 303..  We took that to the interstate which stays out in the country all the way....

When we got back to the skyharbor airport, the winds began to be high and full of dust and rain again....  We are definitely into the monsoon weather now as this seems to be happening every night...  But the weather folks are saying 107 again by Friday of this week......  Uh, I can't wait!!

Retired Rod