Windy Day in the Valley of the Sun

Monday February 27^th

Discussion amongst the two Kowalski halves last night and this morning as to when Tony gets to go exploring in the mountains and when Cathey gets to get her hair fixed. So we decided today was for nearby exploring and beauty shop business. Cathey made an appointment at a beauty salon in Gold Canyon, which is a few miles east of here, but that wasn’t until 4pm so we first went to a shopping area in Mesa. I found an istore there where I bought a wireless mouse for my Macbook (fed up with the track pad). Also a brief stop at the Barnes & Noble there and then we discovered an AJ’s Grocery/Deli in the same area. AJ’s was a favorite place for lunch in Tucson on our visits there. This one is very similar but the outside seating area isn’t as nice as the one in Tucson.

I got Cathey to her appointment a little early and then had a little over an hour to do some exploring. I drove E on US-60 to a side road that went to Queen Valley, which looks like a resurrected Ghost town. There is a golf course there and an RV Park as well as a few houses. There is a dam outside the town (on Queen Creek, I assume) but the road up to the dam was locked off so I wasn’t able to see if there was any water behind the dam. Later I looked at the Google map of the area and it looks like there is very little water back there, but it’s hard to tell how old the Google map picture is. Also drove up a dirt road closer to Gold Canyon but didn’t have time to get to anything interesting.

Back to Gold Canyon and picked up Cathey and headed back to the trailer. We were going to cook on the charcoal grill tonight but the wind was blowing pretty briskly and by the time I was ready to give up on getting the charcoal lit, Cathey said we could eat leftovers. It was a very windy day today and you could tell there was a lot of dust in the air. When we got back to the trailer there was a thin coat of grit on every horizontal surface, courtesy of the wind and open windows. Temps still in the mid 70s but tomorrow is supposed to be cooler.