Day 4 thru 9 30 Day Copper Caynon Tour

It has been a few days since the last post.  It is just amazing how many parks have only 15

AMP power, very low water pressure (that you do not want to drink without adding beach to it), sewer if you want to call it that, but they do have Wi-Fi at just about every park.

After leaving Guaymas we headed to Alamos.

There are a lot of road side venders trying to sell you just about anything from food to

Pottery, that is very colorful.

You also may be able to pick up some very colorful birds, the only problem is when you go to leave Mexico they will stay here and you will be out some money.

 Alamos has a lot of history that dates back to the early 1600’s, when the Spaniard’s came to Mexico.  There was a lot of silver mined from this area.  Then after the mines start closing the town almost became a ghost town.  After WWII this area attracted a lot of Americans that wanted to get away from the bureaucrats of the USA and just live in peace.  The houses here have to retain their looks of the 1800 – 1900.  At that time they were in bad repair.  

Here are a few pictures of Alamos’, if you look real close you can see some of the neat court yards they have.

If you look out there in the distance, you can see the arches we came trough when we entered the town.

Ever town has a cemetery, and why are we drawn to them is because of their beauty that you will see in the following pictures.

The Mexicans are very religious people and honor their dead.  On the first of November they have big party’s here in the cemetery to honor their family that has passed.  

A lot of the masonry work is great.

The RV Park we are staying at here in Alamos has everything; water, sewer Wi-Fi at the office, and power that is above 132 volts most of the time.  So to get the power down so that our surge protectors will let the power by so we can at least charge our batteries, we hook up heaters to drop the volts.  It worked some times and other times it was just luck that we got power.

On the 28^th of January we head out for Los Mochis, this is where we will be sitting for 9 days and the rest of the group will be heading up into the Copper Canyon.  I should note we are puppy sitting and cat sitting for the guest while they are in the canyon.  On our way there we passed some of Mexico’s agricultural areas.

 There is a lot of hay and corn being grown here; I think a lot of it is for the pig farms and dairy farms.

 As you can see someone likes to keep an eye on where we are going.

After a somewhat long drive,

We finally see our sign for Los Mochis.  We make a couple of more turns and low and behold we pull into another empty camp ground.

We have not had any problems all the way to here, and it is really too bad that more people do not come down here to see this beautiful country.  While we were getting set up to bring our people in we had one other camper show up.

Here it is full of Adventure Caravan coaches.  I think I said earlier that we have power (which is 30 AMP out of a 15 AMP plug), water that is ok, and sewer that is working.  We also have Wi-Fi at the office. 

Cyndy & I are here watching the 3 dogs; one of them is ours, and a cat.  Cyndy takes care of the feeding and I do the walking of the other two dogs.  The cat kind of does her own thing; Cyndy does spend some time with her a couple of times a day.  Other than that we are sitting back enjoying life here with the dogs and cat. I don’t know when the next post will be.  But if I have Wi-Fi I will let you know what we are up too.

Day 2 & 3 of the 30 Day Copper Canyon

The last two day’s have been outstanding.  We left yesterday morning at 8:00 AM for Guaymas, Mexico.  It was just over a 300 mile drive and everything went great.  Everyone made it to the RV Park with no problems.

It is hard to believe that families live like this and are happy.

We must be getting close; there is a sign to Guaymas.

The traffic is not too bad, but the roads can get a little narrow.

We stopped for a short break and we have 7 rigs following us.  I hope they are all still behind me!

Look at this they are all spaced out behind us, and to think they think I know where I am going.  Wait until we make it to the park, I hope we don’t make any wrong turns.

After a great day of a wonderful drive and no one getting lost, it was time for social.  We had everyone tell us about their trip today.  Everyone really enjoyed it.

And here is the other half of the group.

Just as we were heading over for dinner at the “Hotel Playa de Cortes” this was the sunset we saw from the court yard of the hotel.  What a view.

We had an outstanding dinner after a long drive day.

  We had our choice of shrimp, fish, chicken and steak all fixed in the Mexican cuisine.  They had a great Tortilla Soup with just the right amount of spices (not to hot but just right).  After a long day everyone turned in early, because today we are heading to the Pearl Farm just around the corner.

Here is a group walking, I took a few that could not walk in our truck up to the Pearl farm.

We are listening to the gentleman explain how they get the oyster to produce the beautiful blue pearl.

It was a very interesting process, from the time the oyster is first impregnated with the small bead of a oyster shell from the fresh waters of the Mississippi.  It was very interesting and how much work they put into raising these oysters.

  

When the mother of pearl oysters lay their eggs in the month of November & December, these sacks are tied in the water to give them a place to attach themselves too.

After a couple of months the sacks are brought out of the water near the end of January first of February.   They are then put these traps to grow a little bit more.  After about another year they are moved into these traps.

Now the first trap, the sacks, these oysters are called babies.  Then when they moved them to the little pyramids,  which are the nursery’s.  Now the ones that are put in here are called Teen’s.  These oysters get a lot of handing by humans; they take them out of the water to clean the shells of barnacles and other parasites at least every month. 

Now when the oysters are placed in here they have been planted with one of those beads to make a pearl.  Within a year to 1 ½ years they will harvests the pearl.  When they harvest the pearl they also use sale the meat from the oyster also.  He said on average a oyster only lives for 5 to 6 years, so they want to harvest the pearl before the oyster dies and the pearl falls to the bottom of the ocean.

Here is what the oyster farm looks like under the surface, as you can see they keep them off the ocean floor so that they get plenty of fresh ocean water.

If you look real close this is called a half pearl that is formed on the shell.  After a great presentation about how pearls are formed, where do we go next?

Yep, the store!  Here the women and men can at least touch and hold and then buy “The Mother of Pearl”.  After the Pearl farm everyone was on their own to explore the town and get ready to move to Alamos.

1st day of 30 Day Copper Canyon

Today was the start of our tour for the 30 Day Copper Canyon Top & Bottom.  We were busy getting ready to put on the orientation explaining what is going to happen.

 Ray is doing the presentation and the rest of us are in the back of the room (that is the staff) making faces at him, not really. We have a great bunch of people.  Everyone is rip roaring and ready to go. After an hour of telling them what to expect it was time ------

-------to eat. as you can see it is Mexican theme.

What a neat meat tray!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cyndy, Jan, and Priscilla put together a great meal for all of our guest.

It looks like everyone is getting plenty of food, hope we don't have a lot left over.  Guess what we did a pretty good job of planning how much food to prepare because there was not much left.

I know the picture is a little blurry, but it looks like everyone is enjoying the food.  We had a great meal then it was time to clean up.  Everyone pinched in and with in a half hour we were out of the building.  Tomorrow we cross the border and heading south.  I don't know how much I will be able to post on this trip, but there is hope that the Wi-Fi is pretty good at the parks.  Watch for up coming pictures from Mexico!!!!!!

Jauary 19 -3 days to the start of Mexico Trip

We have been busy, we got here at the Green Valley RV Resort yesterday afternoon.  The only thing on our mine was watching the Seahawks game. So we spent the afternoon watching the Seahawks almost loose the NFC Championship, but as the Seahawks are a team that never give up.  They proved it Sunday and did a super job of it.  The only problem we may not see the Super Bowl because we will be in Mexico, but at least we can listen to it on the radio!!!!!
After the game was over we went out to dinner with the other two couples that are working this trip with us, They will be taking half of the group over to the Baja when Cyndy and I bring the rest out to Nogales.  We talked about the trip and what we would be doing.  A lot of Adventure Caravan stuff we need to do.
Today we went to the border, to get the visa's and hologram's for our rigs.  After a few ups and downs, and double checking everything all three couples got our hologram's and visa's.  We got back to the park and now all we have to do is get all the guest down to the border with correct paper work and documents.  We are hoping it goes smooth and easy, at least we can hope!!!
Tomorrow I will start inspecting rigs and getting everyone checked in while Ray and one of the girls go with him down to get the border stuff done.  Minus three day to the start of another great caravan journey.

January 16th Last Friday in AJ

On Thursday the 15th I went out for my final ride with the guys.  We headed to 4 peaks, up by Lake Roosevelt.  I took a another friend Wes,  he lives in Lakewood, but we met them here 6 years ago and have been friends ever since.

 The RZR looks nice and clean again, how much mud will we find today?  This is suppose to be mostly road ride and nice and easy.

Our goal is to get up to the back side of the 4 peaks right in front of us.

We are getting close to 3500 feet and the Saguaro are starting to thin out up here.

Rock and more rocks, the higher we get the bigger the boulders.

Someone got caried away with this pile of boulders, a lot of them are bigger then the RZR.

I though this was a neat rock formation, what do you think it is?

We are up over 4500 feet now and no more Saguaro.

This is Wes near the RZR and Jim, we need a break to get out and move around a little.

The north slopes still had snow on them, here are a few more pictures.

We were able to see Roosevelt Lake from the 4 peaks that we are on.

We only 10 miles from the lake and HWY 188.

 These two road signs were only a couple hundred yards apart but Highway 87 is where the truck is parked.  We went another 6 miles down towards Highway 188 to get out of the wind and eat lunch.

It was a nice easy ride today and had a lot of fun just crusing around on these roads.

We came around the a corner and off in the distance there was this geyser of water going up in the air.  It was coming from  Fountain Hill, every hour on the hour for 15 minutes they have three pumps that get this geyser to over 500 feet in the air.  It was neat to see this, we have been there on St Patty's Day when they turn it green.  If you are ever in the area make this small town a stop, well worth it.
Today was a day Turbo hates, we were up and going early and taking Turbo to the vet. for his health permit. After a hour with the vet. we were on our way to Costco for three things, Paper Towels that we forgot on our last trip and some eggs and another case of water.  Yep, got out of Costco with just those three things and under $100.00.
As we were heading home the truck decided it was time for it to brake down in the middle of Apache HWY, middle lane.  Clutch peddle went to the floor and did not return.  After a few minutes, Cyndy on the phone to Good Sam, I got the truck so it would start with out a clutch.  Not fun driving a manual transmission without a clutch.  We made it to the Ford dealer ship.  The first think they said is I hope we have the part you need, it may not be here and the earliest we could get one is Monday.  Now you all know we are to be in Green Valley to start our Mexico trip on Sunday.Luck must be with us, they were able to get it fixed and I was very happy.  They had the part in stock which the service guy, Roy, said he has only used one of these in the 12 years working here.
After all that Cyndy and I decided we needed a dinner out so we headed to China City Super Buffet off of South Power road.  We had been here about 3 weeks ago and came back for another great meal on a Friday, Seafood all over the place, shrimp of every type, crab legs (didn't eat any of these to much work for the amount of meat you get), oysters, and fish of a couple of kinds,

As you can see a lot of people (seniors everywhere, wait a minute I am one of those now) and the serving area is nice and clean.  The servers are always bringing out fresh food.  We left with our full belly's and another great dinner out.
Tomorrow we getting ready to move. We are put some more stuff in storage and get the coach ready to move.  Sounds like a lot of fun, not!!!!  Been sitting here for over 6 weeks so a few things to check like, tire pressure, fill fresh water, and I think my list keeps going.