MOVING DAY: SUNIZONA TO TUCSON

We've been so busy here at Paws and Hooves that I couldn't even keep up with the blog... and now today is moving day.

We got in one short but strenuous hike in Cochise Stronghold - a trailhead Rosanna and I have been curious about for a long time. We thought it might tie into the main Stronghold trail, but it didn't - instead it grew more and more difficult until we ALL agreed that going forward (which meant going UP, using hands as well as feet) seemed to put us at too great a risk for the potential benefit (of putting our curiosity to rest). I don't know about Frank (holding up the boulder while we slid past) or Rosanna, but I know Odel and I were in bed mightly early that night!

What else did we do? Put a new layer of cob on the oven, of course, and celebrated it with a wonderful pizza party last night. Hauled a truckload of hay back to the ranch. I bought a new pair of Ariat hiking boots - the pair I bought last year were ready to be replaced.

We received our personal snail mail and the Boomer snail mail, so did lots of Boomer business. Cooked, cleaned, did laundry. Cut up wood for the oven. Odel changed the coolant in the generator, and drained the water out of the the air tanks. We received a new monitor for our Pressure Pro tire monitoring system, and swaped it out for the defective one. There was more, lots more, but I can't even remember it all!

Odel flies to Memphis on Thursday morning, so today we are heading up to Tucson to try to snag a spot in popular Catalina State Park. On the way we will stop at the Benson SKP park to dump our holding tanks, stop at another RV park in Benson to drop off the defective Pressure Pro monitor to the couple we bought our system from, stop at Trailer Refrigeration to have the automatic ice-maker fixed (it hasn't worked properly since the refrigerator was repaired).

If Catalina has any space available when we arrive for the ice-maker repair, I'm going to zip up there (25 miles north) in the Jeep and snag one; otherwise, we have a great backup plan: the offer of a place to overnight near the park on the property belonging to friends we met in Loma Linda who live within about 5 miles of the park.

It's a full day, and I've gotta' get going!