Well, today is our last day! We woke up in Phoenix, found some coffee, and discussed where we wanted to spend our last day. We had to be at the airport by 4:00 pm, so that gave us a big chunk of time. After considering several choices (like going shopping which is not fun for Chuck), we decided to go to the Desert Botanical Garden.
I thought it was kinda pricey to get in (no free military passes on this one!), but since you can easily spend a whole day there, I thought the price was worth it. You can tell they really put a lot of work into this place! And they did a good job keeping the place neat and clean.
There are different sections that you can meander off into and one of the first sections was this flower garden where they had some interesting flowers and different plants.
Another section was the Butterfly Pavilion. I think this was my favorite part. It's a closed off place where you go in through a plastic sheet (they don't want any butterflies to escape!) and there's thousands and thousands of butterflies flittering about. When you first walk in, they give you an envelope with butterflies in it that you can set free. When I opened mine, one of the butterflies sat on my thumb and didn't wanna get off. Anyhoo, it was really cool to walk around in there with all those butterflies flying around. They tell you to watch your step cuz sometimes they sit on the ground and you might step on one.
Too bad our cameras couldn't catch the image of how many of them were flying around.
Anyhoo, the rest of the park was interesting - lots of desert-like plants.
I really loved this yellow tree! It was like walking into a painting.
It was really hot out that day, close to 100 degrees, but it was fun walking around by these giant cacti, plus it's easier to bear the heat when you know you're gonna be out of it soon.
There were lots of displays to look at on the side.
And Chuck always took pictures of the interesting flowers.
We even saw some interesting wildlife.
After spending probably about 3 hours in that heat, we were hot, thirsty, and hungry, so we ate at the restaurant that they have on the premises. It was a very nice restaurant with good food and the prices weren't too bad. If you ever get to Phoenix, this Botanical Garden is a day well spent!
So that was our trip! It was great fun, and there is still so much I still want to see that we missed out on, but it was time to go home to our kitties, who I'm sure were missing us and waiting for us to come home.
yeah.
We are thinking our next big trip will be in the Colorado/Utah area because Kayla is supposed to graduate, but we'll see how things go.
So it's been two months since we came back, and I feel like I'm still trying to get into my normal routine. After we came back, we had one day to unpack and get ready to leave again. This time we spent the weekend in Fairbanks so we could attend Stephanie's graduation commencement at UAF. There were 1000 names to sit through, so it took awhile. But I'm glad we went.
Then the weekend after that was the quilting retreat. I stayed there (same place as last year) for 2 nights and got a lot of quilting done. I was the 2nd one to arrive there on Thursday, so I had a lot of choices as to where I wanted to plant myself. Last year I was next to that bear head, but this time I moved over to the table next to it cuz I needed to set up my iron this time and that bear head was gonna be in my way. By the time I left (on Saturday afternoon), the place was maxed out, so I'm glad I left.
One lady was making a "temperature quilt". I've never heard of a "temperature quilt" before, so I was intrigued. I think it would be interesting to make one for Stephanie based on Fairbanks temperatures, since they have both extremes there. I've already been on Pinterest looking for different patterns and found some really cool ones, but I haven't committed myself to doing one just yet.
This is outside of the lodge. Very pretty there, but, being mid-May, it was still too cold to sit out there for very long and be comfortable. Anyway, I went there to quilt, not to sit outside.
Since then, I've been pretty busy getting my garden established, so I have not done any quilting until just recently. We've made some changes this year, which have kept us busy. And now that the garden is established, I am staying busy maintaining it. There's always weeds to pick, but watering everything is so time consuming. It's nice to have warm temps and sunshine, but it also means I have to go outside and spent two hours traipsing across the yard with a watering can. So when it rains, I welcome it because that means I don't have to go outside and water. Rain brings two hours of extra time to my day! Anyhoo, that is why I haven't had much time for any of my fun hobbies lately. There's just always too much to do outside. And now that Chuck just left for his motorcycle trip, I'll have even more things to do, but I am determined to get some sewing done while he's gone! Starting tomorrow. Hopefully.
And maybe I will bore you with all that in my next post.
If you can bear my bore.
No comments:
Post a Comment