In the Nick of Time...

East Mesa Arizona!    from my easy chair....  The heat is running to bring the house back to 68 degrees....  It is raining outside rather steadily and the temperature is 40....

We were up fairly early this morning because it was an hour earlier than our internal clocks were reporting....  We hadn't brought much in from the car, so the packout was fairly quick.....

The mob at the motel had eaten all of the continental breakfast by the time I was looking for a bagel.....   Gone, the man told me....  Sorry...........  Ya, right I thought..

So we were slowed by a trip to McDonalds and a fill up of gas...  We were rolling quite fast and the next thing we knew it, we were thru Albuquerque...

We stopped at the Route 66 Casino on the West side and topped off the gas..  That was another 200 miles, so Loyce took the wheel..  We drove to Grants and left the big road..

This time we took Nm 53 and went thru a Nat Monument  El Malpias  and then thru Indian reservations.  We were quite high in altitude, almost 8,000 feet.   Then thru a small and rather poor Indian town of Zuni Pueblo...  The hot commodity in that town seemed to be wood for your fireplace...  There were many pickups up town with wood for sale...  It will be quite cold there tonight...

You could see the storm off in the distance as we crossed into Arizona and the sunny day was replaced with dense clouds...  We drove for Show Low....  where we topped the tank again, and I  took back over the driving...

It was just dusk as we drove thru the Salt River Canyon area with temperatures in the mid 30s..  That's where we saw the first rainy snow flakes...  I was glad we were climbing back out of the canyon on fairly dry roads.  That only lasted a few more miles as when we were in Globe, it was raining right down...

By now it was dark and the roads were completely wet...  As we descended to the valley, we saw snow flakes and big rain drops which alternated depending to the temperature...

It was about 42 when we passed Gold Canyon, and thankfully we were out of the snow... We arrived about 7:15, which would be fairly early, if it was summer and still  light.....  But it seemed like the middle of the night, as we unloaded the massively over stuffed vehicle... 

So we are here at the Arizona house right before the storm is to be in full force...  I don't think we will be getting anything other than rain and cold, but they reported it will be freezing in the morning...  Now up in the mountains were we just came thru, that will be a different story...  Glad we made it tonight....

Retired Rod