Getting Settled In and Making A Home In Arizona

Anne-Marie and I have been working on making our RV site an easier place to walk around.  We have bought a couple of bird feeders, and bird seed, and even a new porch rug, our old one wasn’t worth saving for another season.  The weather has been hot since our arrival, and Anne-Marie has had the air-conditioning on in the afternoon, and it’s now cooling down for a few days.

This is our front yard, with nothing set up.  I used the wheelbarrow to move the lighter colored gravel around, and it really makes a difference once the fist sized rocks were covered up.  The tree is a Palo Verde, and the bark is green.  The tree is situated in a depression, and this is from when the park was being leveled, and this saved the tree during construction.  A cactus has been growing at the base of the tree and has spread about and now the depression has been home to packrats and a few rattlesnakes.  To eliminate the hidey holes for the critters, I have been clearing out the depression, and when done, I will dump gravel around the depression, and smooth the rocks over the the exposed dirt.  This work should be finished later today, and the remaining bird feeders filled and hung.

Our friend Linda, asked where we were parked, and this picture should show our house in relation to the other RVs in the cul-de-sac.  We are only one space over from where we were for the last three winters.

Yesterday we went on a walk in the desert.  This is a small pause at the graves of Bill and Ole Shep, with Steve, Maria, Jeanne, and Anne-Marie.  Our walk was a little over two miles and we crossed into several small washes, and it was amazing to see the amount of gravel and sand that was moved around.  Some small washes had all the sand removed, and others filled to the brim with flood waters and scoured the desert floor out on the flat.  Maria told us that the rain was so hard, and the flooding in the washes was so high during this time, that she was unable to get home from work for 1 1/2 hours, till the flooding receded.

I bought a seed block, from the feed store, and I set it out in a in a wash along with the trail camera, yesterday.  The javelina had visited Steve’s RV the night before, and I hope to get some pictures of them at the seed block.