Wow - it's been 10 whole days without a post! That's mostly because we have settled in to our site at Mesa and it's just like being back home (except without the snow and cold). We arrived here on Saturday, March 1st during the first rainstorm they've had since December. It was an uneventful trip except that we were stopped by one of Arizona's finest. He gave us a warning because we didn't move over to the left lane when there was a car pulled over on the shoulder. It's the law in Arizona (and most other states) and the only reason Marty didn't do it was because he didn't have enough time to move over safely. It was only a warning and the police officer was pretty nice, he even told us that it was either us or the u-haul behind us that he was going to stop - I guess it was our lucky day.
We arranged to stay here in Holiday Village way back in December. We had site #242 reserved but when we got here that spot was taken and the office was closed for the weekend. We ended up in a less than desirable section backing up to the road and we weren'
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| Doesn't take much to make this girl happy. |
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| Wrigley West |
t real thrilled about it. We decided to take a drive around the area and see if we could find another park to stay at with comparable pricing. Well, finding a spot in March in Mesa for a reasonable price is pretty much impossible. Holiday Village is $521.00 for the month with electric, water and sewer included. The closest price we could find to that was about $625.00 and that did not include electric! Holiday Village was looking better and better and once the office opened on Monday and they put us in a different site we were fine. This park is dated (or as we like to say Retro). It has everything we need (a swimming pool and hot tub) and it's very well located (only 2 miles to the ballpark). My favorite fast food restaurant in Chicago is Portillos and they have two locations in Arizona - one only four miles from us, guess where we ate our first night :). There were so many people there from Chicago mostly wearing their Cubbie blue, I felt right at home.
A company Marty did some real estate photography for back in Chicago (VHT) has hired him to do some work down here, they are anticipating about fifty properties to photograph. We did one job on Monday in Mesa and and about ten more during the rest of the week. These are all houses that are for rent due to the housing collapse (probably short sales or foreclosures). It's been interesting to see the different houses and areas of Mesa and Phoenix. It takes Marty about 45 minutes to an hour to do the photography and then about an half-hour to process each one on the computer when we get back. I go in to each house to check them out when we get there (I love looking at houses) but then I go back to the truck and read while he's finishing up. One day we were parked outside a school at around noon. I watched the preschoolers being dropped off and then I just had to get out of the car to talk to the teacher. It was just like being back at St. William - the kids were signed in and then walked to the classroom with the teacher's aide. The preschoolers were adorable and there were a lot of boys in the class - 11 boys and only 5 girls, I remember years like that at SWS too. I really miss my SWS family - thank goodness for Facebook!
Another project we have going on is selling some of our "collectibles" on Ebay. I have 16 Baccarat crystal animals that we've been carrying around with us to sell and we finally are getting to it. It's quite a project - each item is photographed from 3-4 different angles and then a description is added. We've looked up previously sold listings on Ebay to determine reasonable prices. There were all gifts from a company I worked at 20 years ago and it's time to move them along. As we continue our travels we hope to pick up more things to sell from garage sales and estate sales.
It hasn't been all work this week, we did do a hike at "Dreamy Draw" in Phoenix on Tuesday.
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| This is a hiking, biking and horse trail |
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| Dreamy Draw Cactus |
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| Hiking the hills |
On Sunday we finally did our first Volkswalk. There are two different Volkswalks in Mesa, they both start at the Best Western on Main Street and you can choose the downtown walk or the canal walk. We decided to go with the downtown walk. The other choice you need to make is whether you want to do the 5K walk or the 10K walk, we went with the 10K but may have possibly ended up only doing about 8K (Maddie was getting tired). After the walk we headed over to Dairy Queen and then back to Holiday Village for some pool time - ahhhhh life is good.
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| You gotta stop and smell the roses (or whatever other flowers you find) |
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| Our First Volkswalk in Mesa |
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| There are so many grapefruit and orange trees down here. |
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| A person could get used to this :) |
There's not much else going on down here so it will probably be another ten days before the next post. Only 11 more days until Sue and Sarah Beth come to visit us and then we'll have lots to report. Maybe we can even convince Sarah to be a guest blogger.
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