Our first stop was at Besh-Ba-Gowah Archeological Park in Globe, AZ.
First there was a video to watch with free cookies in the back of the room. Melodie loved the cookies. The video was very informative. I won't bore you with what we learned about Besh-Ba-Gowah, but if you are interested, check out these websites: City of Globe and James Q. Jacobs. Then we walked through the little museum which had the artifacts found at the ruins. Melodie did some crayon rubbings and then we went out to explore the ruins.
What was cool about this place is that you could really explore the restored areas. You could even climb up the ladder to the second story. This was not something I was interested in doing (I like my ladders to be from Home Depot) but Rocky and Melodie went up.
After a brief look at the botanical garden (where we tried to grind some corn on stone) we were on our way again.
We tried to listen to General Conference on Rocky's new phone. We were slightly successful. We were able to hear and watch quite a few talks, but we did lose the internet a few times. We also knew because it was Sunday that we wouldn't actually be able to walk the grounds of the Gila Valley Temple, but we wanted to see it anyway. Before long the Temple came into view.
We got out of the car and it was windy! Really windy! We still enjoyed walking around, but not for very long. It's a very beautiful temple, but we just weren't expecting that wind.
Before long we were back in the car heading to our final destination. That night we were camping at Rockhound State Park in Deming, NM. When we crossed into New Mexico we lost an hour, but we were excited to be in a state we've never been to before.
We pulled over for a picture once we were in New Mexico. We got back in the car and a little further down the freeway saw another Welcome to New Mexico sign. How funny! So, we took a picture with that one too.
We arrived at Rockhound and confused ourselves. I had made reservations to camp there, but there was an entrance fee. You were suppose to put your $5 in an envelope and then into a box or you would be fined. We did not have a $5 bill. We drove 15 min. back to the gas station we had just stopped at to get change and then 15 min. back to Rockhound where we paid our $5.
And it was still windy. We found our campsite (easy enough once we found the numbers on the sites - that took us a couple of times driving around) and set to work setting up our tent. This was very difficult in the wind. Everything was blowing away. We had Melodie stand on the tent to hold it down while we tried to get the stakes into the hard ground. The stakes didn't go in very far and it was too windy not to have something hold the tent down. We ended up using rocks. We got the tent up and quickly threw heavy things into it to hold it down. We were still wondering if it would blow away. It was that windy. Then Rocky set to work building a fire. It was hard work in the wind, but eventually he was successful (yay Rocky!) and we made our hot dogs.
We sat around the fire, in the wind, eating and enjoying the view.
We were going to make s'mores, but I forgot the chocolate (the best part!). We just cooked the marshmallows (or burnt, in my case) which Melodie was just fine with. For her that's the fun part. We put Melodie to bed while we cleaned up. Before long we were in bed as well. Very early for us (especially me). Luckily we were very tired because the sound of the wind against the tent was pretty loud. Melodie ended up in Rocky's sleeping bag because it got colder than we thought it would. We were prepared for the cold (lots of blankets and warmers) but they were all in the van. I didn't wake up when she moved into sleep with him (her sleeping bag is not a real camping sleeping bag) but I suppose he didn't think it was worth the effort to go to the van to get all those things. I sure wouldn't have left the tent. It was cold. And windy. Did I mention the wind before?
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