We took a day to take a drive into the desert region Northeast of Apache Junction to go see the desert landscaping to include Canyon Lake. The lakes out here are all man made, by building dams at the end of canyons. This makes for a neat looking lake with canyon walls for the sides. The day we went was just a few days after a snow fall had hit the high desert and some of the mountains had snow still on them. My favorite is a mountain called Four Peaks. Yes there are four peaks on that mountain but it was a little hard to see that day due to the weather.
We made it to a little stage coach stop called Tortilla Flats that is more of a ghost town but it has a gift shop and we also got ice cream from the small bakery before returning home.
Lots of pictures of Arizona Desert and Canyon Lake, and Four Peaks. Enjoy.
During my kids involvement in CAP in their Virginia Beach squadron, they both earned their Model Rocketry Badge, but unfortunately the whole Hampton Roads area had a ban on shooting off rockets that could hit any kind of altitude due to all of the military aviation activity. We kept the rockets that they had built though and we made a day to go to the desert away from town to launch them. It was a lot of fun.
There happened to be a CAP squadron near us at Mesa's Falcon Field airport. It was a small squadron and both of my kids outranked just about all of them. They were able to contribute lots during the meetings as they also had the most experience when it came to how events should be run. The squadron took advantage of their experience too by making them a Flight Commander and a Flight Sargent, even though they knew we were only going to be in town a few months.
Son and Daughter in flag detail at change of command ceremony
While here in Arizona, we had Christmas with my In-Laws, Nana and Papa, and we celebrated several birthdays to include my daughter's, my mother's, and my wife's.
Most were spent going out to dinner to Organ Stop Pizza, but my daughter wanted a girls day out with Mom and Nana.
While we were here we decided that we should stay in the Mesa/Apache Junction area for a few months and see about me getting a job for a while to help pay down some of the bills that arose from the car problems we had in Texas. My In-laws are here and the reason we came to Arizona was to spend Christmas with them, but as we haven't had a lot of time to spend with them over the last 20 years, we thought an extended stay would be appropriate. My parents just recently bought a Park Model at a mobile home park in Mesa and could use some help with some maintenance on that as well, and my mother would be staying there for the winter months so that was another contributing factor to sticking around. Now the search was on for a place to stay for an extended period of time.
There are probably close to a hundred places in the Phoenix area that take RV's. Most of these are combined with mobile home parks and are designed for winter visitors. The problem arises that all of these places cater to the retired crowd and have age restrictions that state you have to be 55 years old or older to stay there. I unfortunately don't fit that category, and having kids along is a strict negative. There are only a few RV parks on the east side that are popular for camping, with families, and those are Usery (where we were at), and Lost Dutchman State Park, but both of these have 14 day stay limits and are booked up most all winter. There is a KOA campground pretty far out, that could also be a possibility but it would be very expensive. I finally found an RV/Mobile home park that accepted families in Apache Junction (East of Mesa), and they had openings and we could stay for a few months. It's nothing special but it's cheap.
There are other kids in this park and daughter has made several friends. The kids have also been able to find a Civil Air Patrol squadron near buy and have gotten involved in that. I wanted to do some workamping but it was a little to late in the season to find one of those available and the lack of family parks was really going to make that impossible here, but I was able to get a job with a temporary company that sends workers and maintenance men to apartment complexes. I was sent to my first complex for a few days and I was offered the job permanently but I had to explain that I wasn't looking for permanent employment.
Organ Stop Pizza is a place in Mesa AZ. I grew up in Mesa and this was the place that I went for almost everyone of my birthdays growing up (there was no Chuck-E-Cheese). We came on other occasions too as the ambiance is great and admission is free. The pizza is pretty good too but maybe a smidge more expensive than some of the other pizza options out there (large 14" 1 topping pizza is $15.79).
The main attraction is a Wurlitzer Theater Pipe Organ, that was built back in the day of silent pictures when theaters had an organist play the background music for movies. This one though has been tricked out and put on steroids. It has an insane amount of pipes and is also connected to drums, xylophones, pianos, woodwinds, trumpets, and too many special effects to name.
When we walked in my kids caught a glimps of the organ an the music that was playing wasn't too familiar right away and my son later said he was expecting to hear opera music all night. Thankfully the selections ended up being mostly music my kids knew with music from Star Wars, musicals, and Disney movies. They had request cards that we tried to get my kids to fill out for requests but they didn't know what to put down until they started hearing some of the other songs played, but as luck would have it, once they got the hang of it they were excited when something they requested came up in the stack. We were also surprised when some music that you wouldn't associate with a pipe organ was played like Bohemian Rapsody by Queen, and Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry.
We've been there twice now on this trip and will probably go again as we still have a couple of months in the area. Here are a few YouTube video links, but they aren't mine
On the 14th of December we left Sierra Vista and headed to Usery Mountain Park in Mesa AZ. for a week. Usery is up on a hillside and has several small mountains in the park. It has great views of the east valley of the Phoenix area. The really beautiful thing about the RV area is that the spaces are very far apart from each other. The park has lots of cactus including saguaro, barrel, and cholla. There are also lots of hiking oportunities but we were short on time and the weather, although warm, was rather wet while we were here.
OOOWWWW, Cholla hurt.
Sign on a local mountain, long ago pointing aviators who had strayed.
Daughter said "I thought this type of cactus were only in cartoons".
Views of city lights
Black Light in the foreground is kids looking for scorpions. Big lights in middle was the bath house.
One of many trails.
I grew up in Mesa and primarily in East Mesa which is close to where Usery is. the second day we were here, we had some fun checking out all of the changes that have happened in the area in the last 20 years. There is even a new freeway system that is very helpful for getting around, but is taking some time to get used to. We took a long afternoon drive to take the kids to see all of our old hangouts, and schools and homes that we used to live in. We finished the night by taking them out for pizza at the most famous pizza place in Mesa (see next post)
