Returning to my roots….

Nov. 17, 2013

Clear and fairly warm!

Lat/Lon 36.2N 115.4W

Woohoo!  The latitudes are dropping and temperature are rising!

Even tho I was born in Las Vegas, I have never really been there.  We moved when I was about a year old, and I've never been back,.. until now.  

We stayed at the RV park at Nellis Air Force Base.  Nellis is the home of the Thunderbirds.  We didn't get to see them practice, but we did see some take off right over us.  Of course by the time I got my camera out of my pocket, they were tiny specs in the sky.  This is a beautiful sculpture at the entrance of the base.

Charley and I are not big on gambling, glitz and crowds, so we never did go down to 'the strip'.  

We did go to Lake Mead. 

We had a couple of big horn sheep pop out of the canyon right below us.  

We watched them and they watched us for quite a while.

We took a helicopter ride over Hoover Dam and the lake.  

That's our shadow between the 2 lanes of the highway.

 Hoover Dam and Memorial Bridge

 Charley LOVES helicopters.  As we were getting in, he looked like a kid that just got a pony for Christmas!

Of course I spotted a sailboat down on the lake!

That tiny white dot in the yellow circle is our truck!

Thanks Amazon, for making the helicopter ride possible!

~ ~ ~ ~ 

We also spent a little time exploring the desert.

I mentioned on Facebook how fascinated I was with the saguaros.  I've seen them in photos all my life, but to see them up close and for real is so amazing to me.  I thought that if you hiked across the desert, you might see one every couple of miles…. but they grow almost like forests!  And HUGE! 

 

For years, I have had a deep-seated hatred of cacti.

Allow me to tell you a story… 

Several years ago, I was working in a garden center that brought in potted cacti, and sold them with house plants.  We carried all sizes, shapes and varieties. They were lined up on shelves near an exit door.  One day, I was stocking some fairly large barrel-type cacti, when a little boy came flying through the door and rammed the shelves with a shopping cart.  A large cactus, (a little larger than a cantaloupe), fell from the top shelf.  Instinct kicked in before my brain did, and I stuck both hands out and caught it before it crashed to the floor.  

V E R Y  B A D   I D E A.  

The palms of both my hands were FULL of little tiny spines! 

(It had spines similar to the one in the photo above, almost furry looking.)  

One of the guys I worked with sat with a pair of tweezers for half an hour trying to pick them out of my hands.  But most of them were so small that they were hard to see with the naked eye, like fine little hairs. We could see them well enough, however, to see that there were still hundreds in my hands.  So I went home and Bob tried tapes to pull them out,(which hurt like hell!), then he finally sat down with my palms under his big fly typing magnifier, and picked for well over 2 hours.  It took days to get them all out, and my palms were swollen for a week. 

So after that, I hated cacti, and refused to stock, water or go near them EVER again.

Until now,...

 After seeing them in the wild down here, I think I am developing a 'cautious admiration' for them.  I still have a healthy respect for them.  I don't get very close, and I make sure my footing is stable when near one.  (I can't even fathom falling on one!)  But they are kind of cool.

There are so many different varieties.  This one was about 4 feet tall.

 This one was about 3 feet tall.

 This one was about 18 inches.

Emmy loves exploring with me.

Next time,… Christmas trees!