9 - PHOENIX AND WARM WEATHER...FINALLY!

We finally arrived at our RV park in Sun City, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. And I am thrilled to find 70+ degree weather here. 

When we arrived, someone said, "Welcome to Paradise!" Paradise RV Park, that is.  This is a different RV park than any we have ever been in before. There are nearly 1000 spaces here and the vast majority of them have what is called a "Park Model" on them. Very few of them are actually RV spaces. 

Park Models are tiny homes, a little larger than a mobile home. So many people come down here just for the winter, it works well for them. Some are resident owned, many are rented for shorter periods of time. 

There is also a myriad of activities that one can participate in here...or not. Friends of ours play Pickle Ball fairly often. I prefer my pickles on the end of a fork.

Being here is a real experience for Don. As you may have noticed, we don't often go someplace in the RV and just sit...and we are scheduled to be here for three weeks...!

However, I have found a number of things that I have lined up to go see and /or do while we are here.

Yesterday we drove about 25 miles west of here to White Tank Mountain Regional Park. 

This is a very large park. Of course there are picnic areas and even some campgrounds, but mostly it is a maze of hiking trails.

The trail we were interested in was Waterfall Canyon Trail. Overall the trail wasn't bad and not a hard hike. 

Of course there were areas that were rocky and some hills to climb but these old folks enjoyed and survived the trip.

We were excited to see petroglyphs along both sides of the trail...LOTS of petroglyphs!

These glyphs were made by the Hohokam people centuries ago. Not much is known about them or what happened to them as they have totally disappeared. 

Most Hohokam petroglyphs are geometric shapes as opposed to human or animal shapes. Also, unlike hieroglyphics which was a written language, these are not a language, but a form of storytelling.

This huge boulder was completely covered on all sides with pictures.

Next to an ancient petroglyph, "Tony," found it necessary to desecrate the boulder. Another "Moron Glyph" writer. We found a few of these here but not nearly as many as the last location of petroglyphs we saw a few days ago which had been horribly damage.

This hike was a mile each way and we got rather hot before we finished. When we finally reached the end of the box canyon, we were at the site of a pool. There is a 75 foot waterfall that cascades down over the canyon wall after a hard rain.

This canyon wall is solid rock and it was about 20 degrees cooler there. I couldn't really get a good picture from the pool area to the top of the canyon, but this is close. We gave serious consideration to staying here for a while before heading back down.

There are lots of Saguaro Cactus everywhere in this park and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. It is Arizona after all. They are such stately plants.

 Especially against the sapphire blue sky...

...or against the shadowed mountain in the background.

There was a great view of Phoenix (and the accompanying smog) in the distance.

As we headed back to the car, the sun was dropping behind the mountains.

It was a beautiful hike from start to finish with lots of interesting things to see along the way...and that's the way we like it.

Since we are staying pretty much in one spot, I will post blogs every couple days. So, more later as I've found lots of fun things to see.