For those of you that are interested you can double click the slide show to the right and get a better view of our week in Arizona.

I must say it was just as good as last year but no where near as hair raising. Last year we went in February and it decided to dump snow the night we were leaving Pinetop to drive to our friends in Phoenix, we have a 4 wheel drive Pathfinder, we have lived 8 years (on and off) in Utah, what could possibly go wrong? How about Arizona, even in the mountains, not being used to snow, especially a LOT of snow. Jackknifed 18 wheelers, police cars down embankments, people in shorts and flip flops trying to push their cars out of drifts. Literally miles of cars just STUCK! We were held up for a while in that line of cars, everybody seemed to be waiting for some miracle like a snowplow or something. HELLOOOOO, this is ARIZONA. There are no snowplows, snow shovels, salt, everything a normal person who has seen snow before carries as default.

Needless to say we pushed where we could and helped if it was at all possible. Took pictures of cactus with snow on them, sat and read, ate lunch and then finally realized we were probably the only ones who could actually get down this mountain in one piece and since it would be nice to get to our friends before dark we just took off and started dodging cars that were sideways, trucks that were trying to take up their half in the middle and all the people who decided to make a day of it by building snowmen and the like.

Well it took a while but we did get down the mountain, the only problem was that Phoenix is supposed to be hot, or at least warm in the winter. It was, which meant the snow turned to rain. That might have been OK except by then it was getting dark and I’m a complete woose in the dark and rain. Good job Dear Hubby was driving.

We turned off the main road onto the road we thought was the way to our friends, after about 2 miles of pitch black (well this is the boonie’s of AZ!) and with the rain pelting down we come to a part of the road that is awash with water. When I say awash I really mean it looked like a 10 foot wide river was running across the street. We crawled across and kept going when we came across another river crossing the street, this one ended up being deeper than the last as it was over the bumper. We made it through and drove another 2 miles. I’m not sure what was worse, the dark, the rain or the terror of not knowing where on earth we were!

We finally came to another river but there was no way we could go on, there, reflecting in the headlights in the middle of this moving mass was the roof of another car. Deep Joy! So the only alternative was to turn around and hope like mad that the water hadn’t risen too much and we would be able to get back and find a better route.

I guess it’s one of the joys of living in a desert, when the rains come there is nowhere for the rain to go, the ground is too hard to absorb it and it will just pool together and run to the lowest spot, in this case across where we wanted to go.

The problem with being with other people is that they never think the same way you do. I wasn’t quite sitting in a brown seat yet but it was close, on the other hand Dear Hubby could do nothing but laugh. LAUGH??? I’ve just seen my life flash before my eyes a number of times today, still have the white knuckles to prove it and he LAUGHS? Now, as maniacs come and go I’ve been around a few, you can’t live a varied life and not but I have to say it was not until this moment that I realized I was married to one. It might have been a nervous laugh you say, let me tell you he had nothing on Christopher Lee and Bella Lagosa, it was the laugh of a maniac.

When we finally got to our friends house do you know what he said?

“That was fun”