This Montana Life

Prescott to Surprise!

We ate our way through Prescott’s best: The Raven Café, St. Michael’s Hotel Café, Iron Spur Café, and a GREAT Thai restaurant. My only regret is that we couldn’t try out all the fabulous restaurants. There were shops galore filled with jewelry, fine art, and pottery. The galleries were stupendous. And the people of Prescott were very very nice.

We camped about one mile outside of town in White Spar campground (forest service). We lucked out and had nice and quiet neighbors. Our site was at the head of a super trail for hiking and biking, which EmBee took full advantage of. Prescott is a very bikeable community as we found out from an extremely helpful lady at the High Gear Bike Shop. After telling her our story of the Crown King “expedition” she plastered me with Emergen-C Acai Berry packets full of the “B” vitamins to help alleviate my stress. It must have worked because hanging out in Prescott soothed many parts of my soul. There was freedom and creativity abound!

We headed west on 89 out of Prescott which brought us more of the curvey roads we’ve come to associate this part of Arizona with. A quite lovely and treacherous (although NOTHING compared to the Apache Trail) descent brought us out of the pines and back into the desert heading toward Surprise, our next destination.

Spring Training fever runs in my blood and being a True Blue Mariner’s fan (which I inherit from my parents) I couldn’t leave Arizona without seeing my favorite team in action. Hopefully this will be their season!!! The game for which I have tickets is against the White Sox which is cool because their little Pioneer League Farm Team plays in our home town back in Montana.

Arizona is host to some of the most spectacular state/regional campgrounds I’ve ever seen. White Tank Mountain Regional Park is my favorite for base camping out of to catch Spring Training games. Not to mention that it’s also full of fabulous trails for hiking and biking. If the weather cooperates.

Unfortunately, our first full day was quite soggy. EmBee used this rainy day as a chance to practice his environmental art.

EmBee--up to something...

Is it the Desert Bloom?

Another piece of EmBee art

Watch out wildlife or you’ll have to join the First Lady’s initiative and Get Out and Get Moving (with a crop full of marshmallows).

I used the rainy day as an excuse to drive into West Phoenix and visit “My Sister’s Closet”. WOW! All I can say is I wish we had one of these in Montana. It’s a consignment store with high-end label wear at a fraction of the original cost. My  kind of store!

Amazing blooms on those stickery things

It’s hard to believe that we have less than a week left on this dream month tour with Gina. There are still so many places I want to adventure in before we head back to the grips of the Montana winter. So I’m going to try really hard to live in the moment and enjoy each single second as it ticks away.

Next Blog posting—Mariners vs. White Sox!