Now in Arizona

We arrived in Holbrook, AZ yesterday afternoon so it's a slow morning waking up. We left Oklahoma City on Thursday (elevation 1,230) and arrived here Saturday (elevation 5,080). I'm glad we have a down day today so my body can adapt. I jumped up too quick this morning to come downstairs and my head was spinning. Taking it slow today.

Last Thursday was the 20th anniversary of Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work. The college, where I worked for 18 years participated in this and it was such a special time for me and my employees. When it first started, only daughters could go to work with a parent to job shadow and see what their parent did as a job. Within a year or two, they included sons in it, as it should be. My kids took turns coming to work with me and they would follow me through my day, sitting in on meetings with employees or staff meetings or whatever mom had to do that day. It was such a neat experience to share my workday with my kids. They get to learn about how you make a living and they learn important lessons about interacting with other people in a workplace setting. I know my kids have fond memories of all the years they did this and I hope it helped shape them into good employees for others. They're both great supervisors, having witnessed this first hand. Their employees love them ! My employees loved bringing their children into work with them so they could learn about what mom or dad did at the college. Kids need real world experiences to know about the types of opportunities that are out there.

If any of you like to visit National Parks, like we do, then you need to check out Chimani Apps.Last year, to celebrate National Parks Week, they gave away their suite of park apps and they have five new parks available this year for free. I downloaded a bunch of them and they have so many neat features to them. Lots of detail on hiking trails, scenic places, schedule of ranger led events, etc. They will come in handy for our trip to Zion, Bryce and Canyonland in June. Check them out at your app store on your smart phone.

On our trip west we took a little detour, to go north to Santa Fe, so we could see our friends Wendy and Cindy. They drove down, with Wendy's mom and dad to have dinner with us. It was great to catch up and have a fun evening together. They gave us a great tip, on a place to stay in Santa Fe, that they found from the Day's End directory. This is a publication that Escapees puts out with free or cheap places to stay. We stayed on the rodeo grounds and had full hookups for $20. Easy to get in and out and there were quite a few different sites. We got to watch the horses and steers in the corrals next to us during our stay and it is certainly a place to consider if going to the area. You need to call ahead so they can give you the gate code...the phone # is 505-316-5141, option #9. The address is 3237 Rodeo Drive, Santa Fe, NM. Payment needs to be in the form of cash.

Left Santa Fe Saturday morning and drove the rest of the way to Holbrook and arrived around 1:30. The whole trip took us through 3 time zones, which is another thing that tricks our systems. Since Arizona doesn't recognize Daylight Savings, we are on Pacific time (3 hours behind the east coast). Our drive started out great but upon entering Arizona, we encountered really wicked wind gusts that would hit us like a flyswatter, smacking us sideways. I swear the one time we were up on two wheels when it slammed us sideways into the other lane. That got my heart pounding and we backed off on our speed cause you never knew when one of these gusts would slam us. Linda B was driving and it scared the crap out of her too. But we got here, safe and sound. We're settled in and will stay at this park for a week and move to the other park next week. Seems so weird (but nice) that we're now in 80 degree temps (although the nights are in the 40's). I'll take it over the 40 degree daytime temps we had in Oklahoma. We skipped spring and went right into summer.