If It’s Wednesday, It Must Be Montezuma

Montezuma Castle, that is. That was our Wednesday trip.

Wednesday was quite a journey to get to our destination. We hit two rest stops!

This was the view from the first. We were not far from Casa Grande, and still had a long long ways to go. But the little one had to pee, and all the world stops for that, let me tell you.

Here’s more gorgeous terrain, with rather more road than I like, but hey. It’s still pretty.

I’m always trying to catch birds in motion. Here’s a vulture from the rest stop almost to Montezuma Castle.

My young one, getting a sense of the vastness.

If this post seems mostly pictures, it is. 😉 That’s ’cause I’m really awfully tired. We’re having a FANTASTIC time in our Adventure Week, but it’s just a mite exhausting. I’ll be needing a vacation from my vacation.

Anyway, here’s the “castle.” It’s really awesomely cool, though smaller than “castle” led me to expect. I really enjoyed seeing it, though it didn’t take long, and we couldn’t get anywhere near it.

Near Montezuma Castle (up the road eleven miles, I forget exactly where but the visitor center has maps) is the sinkhole called Montezuma Well.

It is also pretty damn cool. Suddenly, right there in the middle of desert, water.

Even more amazing to me was the creek formed by the run-off. We walked along the path, and suddenly green!

Here the children sit waiting for the slow-pokes before they are allowed to descend and revel in the wonderment of water.

It was so glorious down there, I cannot even tell you. I’m a green-country girl, born and raised in Pennsylvania. This was like coming home. I never wanted to leave. And the kids, who had never had the chance to grow accustomed to an actual flowing creek…

Yeah, can’t describe it, at least not in this state. I may try again later. In the meantime, here’s the after-effects of all that energy.

But was our adventure over? No indeed! Mother Nature had more in store for us. As we left Phoenix headed south, my friend (she was driving) and I noticed dark clouds.

A few more miles, and we noticed yellow under the clouds. Pretty soon it looked like this around us.

If you know anything of the drive between Tucson and Phoenix, you know that this is often the cause of major accidents. We planned to pull over if it got any worse than this–you can see that we still had visibility out past our stopping distance should we spot something ahead. Luckily, it didn’t get any worse than this. Instead it got like this.

Off to the right, in typical Arizona behavior, the sun was setting beautifully between dust storms and rain storms.

So yeah. Adventure! Excitement! Exhaustion!

Now I think I need a nap. Tomorrow is a break from Adventure Week (it got extended by two days) and I am tired just thinking of all the things I should catch up on.

There are a few more pictures here.