Tucson Wildflowers and unexpected travel

Where have I been?  Rather than try to fill in all the blanks over the past month, I’ll just start with the reason for my absence from posting here.

Friday, March 22, I had convinced friends Mike and Lisa to join me on a hike to view the wildflowers in Saguaro National Park West. None of us are ‘morning’ people, but we all agreed on a 7am departure.  We were the first ones on the trail and it was beautiful.

The trail cut across the mountain north to south, so we had backlit flowers on one side and well-lit flowers on the other!  The flowers were beautiful!  Lots of variety and lots of color.

We made it up to the top, a 700’ elevation gain, checked out the view and headed back down.  The total hike was a little over 3 miles and according to Lisa’s fitness tracker – 37 flights of stairs!

My plan for the afternoon was to process some photos and post them on the blog.  Instead I returned home and got two bad phone calls: my dear aunt had passed away the night before, and my father, her brother, had taken a downhill turn while in the hospital.  This was surprising as I’d just spoken to him and he was making plans for departure and assisted living care!

So, we hopped on a plane in the morning to Nevada and were able to be bedside with my father as he passed on the 24.  After wrapping things up there, we then drove to the Fort Bragg/Mendocino area to take care of my Aunts affairs.

We ended up spending about 10 days there doing all the estate stuff we could.  Back here in Tucson, we regrouped, refreshed and tried to get our heads around all of it.

Needless to say, I haven’t felt like doing much of anything, especially not being creative with the blog. But, I think I’m back.

I was just out this morning in our park, taking photos of the hundreds of cactus blooms!  I should have some of those in a day or so!