Up to Date

Are you up to date? Certainly not with my family. Considering that it took me months to share with you the events of our vacation in APRIL! Okay, so now I need to try to share with you what we have been doing, besides ignoring the blog.

This past May was beautiful! I kept thinking, wow! This feels like June, and then I would remember last year...

In case you forgot, the best weather we had last year was in May. It was gorgeous; and then June came with rain, and July came with rain, and need I say more? Thankfully, this year has not been like that. I am working on trusting God as I tend to be one who looks around and says "what a beautiful early Spring, a great gardening year, wow! we have grass; I wonder when the Lord is going to drop the bomb?" As I have been reading in James, God does not offer his gifts to us with a reproach attached. I need to trust that he wants good things for us without a catch.

Back to May: One wonderfully warm, sunny, breezy Monday Tyler got up super early 5:00? and went to work. He had to train a couple of new people, and get some paperwork done. Then at 11:00 he returned to take the rest of the day off and take us all to the BEACH! We all jumped in the car and headed to Fort Popham to have lunch.

I took a ton of pics of the boys at the beach... The shadows were just perfect!

After the fort we went to the beach and walked along the river. To say that it was glorious is an understatement. What a wonderful surprise and a wonderful day that came from the Lord, I must say, without reproach. Thank you Jesus!

So Long, Farewell - Day 4 @ GC

Thursday morning at the canyon opened with a beautiful blanket of snow, and very cold temps. As we are accustomed to EST we tried to stick closer to it while in the west: we retired early and woke early everyday. This morning I took a quick jaunt down to the edge of the canyon to attempt to see the sunrise. Apparently I wasn't the only one up either...

After a wonderful breakfast we started our slow departure from the Grand Canyon. Because of the cold temperatures we departed down the road that runs along the edge of the Canyon. All morning as we traveled we were able to catch glimpses of the canyon on our left. One of our stops was at a Tusayan ruin. We both love history and thoroughly enjoyed looking at the foundations of a few small buildings and evidence that 20-30 people farmed, hunted, and lived along the edge of a supernatural masterpiece.

Our last stop at the Canyon was at the Desert View Watchtower. The watchtower was built about 110 years ago and was made to replicate an indian watchtower in construction and in art. It was quite an interesting structure, but honestly, as a replication it really is more of a tourist attraction than history. The art in the tower was done by a Native American which makes, to me, the drawings and art more interesting than the structure itself.

After our super long drive, in which we saw many old volcanic mountains along the edge of the Colorado Plateau, and many cacti, we ended our day in Phoenix. That evening we were able to get to know the city's layout very well as we traveled from the wonderful Ansel Adams' display at the art museum to Ikea to our hotel for an early evening in preparation for a very early morning flight home.

Sunset on the Canyon

Considering that my last post completely ignored the latter parts of the day reveals to me a need to share with you the view that we encountered later that evening. This was our second sunset at the canyon and although it was cloudier, it was also more vivid. You see the entire afternoon it snowed and snowed and snowed. We had about 2 inches of snow on the ground in the evening and it was cold!

Tyler and I drove over to Yavapai observation station to watch the sunset from both inside and outside the nice heated building...