mike & rhonda's latest adventure: What Was She Thinking????

After getting up early on Sunday to watch Canada win the Gold Medal hockey title again (yahoo), we spent the rest of the day at the final day of the Tucson Rodeo, the 89th edition of La Fiesta de los Vaqueros. We had good seats to watch the action and fortunately for us it was a cloudy day since it was incredibly hot when the sun poked through the clouds. The young cowboys and cowgirls were fun to watch at the beginning and then the pro's took over for some entertaining action. The Bull Riding, always the final event, didn't take as long as we had hoped though. The bulls were in an ornery mood and none of the 11 finalists were able to hold on for the 8 second minimum ride so the qualifying leader took home the major prize money. They didn't give the audience a chance to cowboy-up which was probably a good thing.

The next day we left Tucson and my navigator suggested we stop in Florence for a few days on our way to Phoenix. She said it was a nice historical town, which it was, and we had never been there before. We toured the nearby Casa Grande Ruins (built in 1350) and on the day that we chose to do the historical walk to see the late 1800's buildings still in operation, she claimed to have a minor illness, so I did the self-guided walk around town while she rested in the camper van. There were many interesting buildings, lots of bars, including the Tunnel Saloon which had an underground bar for the really hot days (and probably prohibition later). They ran out of money building the Courthouse in 1912 when silver prices dropped in this former mining town so the Clock Tower has 11:44 painted on it instead of installing a real clock. On our way out of town the next day I noticed several seriously protected prisons and decided to do my own internet research today. It turns out that Florence is also know as Prison City, hosting 9 prisons (county, state, federal, private). As a result others have made claims that it has the world's largest collection of razor wire, which is believable since some of the prisons I saw had 3 or 4 fences making an escape a fairly arduous task. I also read a quote that claimed "officially, men outnumber women 5-1 but it is not the place to go looking for Mr. Wonderful with more than half the population (16K out of 25K) behind bars". So was she really ill, or did she send me out walking around land mines?

Somehow I survived and today we drove to Apache Junction, a place my parents called their winter home for many of their healthy retirement years. We stopped by their former home to find out there had been several owners since they gave it up more than 15 years ago. It brought back some good memories though and we took several pictures to take back home for them.