The first assignment in our Great Adventure was in Phoenix, Arizona.  I have to say, with our Midwestern backgrounds, the desert was quite a shock.  I had never been to the desert before and the lack of moisture ANYWHERE, including the air, was a completely new experience.  We were in Phoenix through the winter.  The desert landscape is hard to describe... if your only experience with the desert is television exposure, as mine had been, it is downright shocking.  No blowing sand, no sand dunes.  More like dry hard dirt and gravel everywhere.  Oh, and all the plants have thorns.  Prickly pear and cactus dominate the landscape as well as the local landscaping.  We did wander into a few neighborhoods that somehow managed to have grass, but I can't even imagine what their water bills must have been!  To me, the city felt, as a whole, unfinished... like a construction site, that hadn't been sodded or seeded with grass yet.   We never got to experience the desert "blooming" after a rainstorm, though I've heard it's lovely, and I've seen pictures taken by others who HAVE experienced it.  The sunsets, on the other hand were amazing.

The children loved being able to play outside in December and January, unlike at home, where subzero temperatures would have them staying indoors, through the winter months. 

We also, didn't find Phoenix to be a terribly child-friendly place.  Of the probably 200 RV parks that exist in Phoenix, only a handful allows children at all.  The first we stayed at, advertised itself as "family friendly," but after six weeks, we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that while our money was welcome, our children were not.  Thankfully, we found a park on the north side of Phoenix, which was THRILLED to have families with children at the park.  So, if you are ever traveling through Phoenix with children, the place to stay is Desert's Edge RV Park! 

Some of the new things we experienced in Phoenix were:

Citrus Trees:  I knew citrus grew on trees, but the experience of picking an orange or a lemon off a tree and eating it... it's pretty amazing.  They've got so much more flavor than the fruit you can buy in the grocery store! 

Javelinas:  One night Mike heard something outside the trailer, and when he looked outside, he could see something moving around, but couldn't tell what it was.  He took out the digital camera, and snapped a few pictures of the darkness, without flash, and then downloaded them onto the computer.  When he lightened the pictures up, he realized our campsite had been visited by several large, very ugly critters.  When we asked the RV Park staff about them, they told us they were Javelinas, a sort of wild boar, which lived in the mountains nearby, and came up the wash, into the campground, scavenging for fruit that fell out of the orange trees.  They also warned us that they were mean critters, and to steer clear of them.  Thankfully, they were nocturnal, and even when we came and went late in the evening, we never saw them face to face. 

Cotton:  I'd never seen cotton growing in a field before, but with irrigation, it's one of the crops they manage to grow around Phoenix. (And one of the few green and growing things I saw while we were there!)

And, again, the lack of water or humidity.  There are washes all throughout the city.  My understanding is that they are to help direct the runoff that comes in the spring, when the snow in the mountains melts, and can actually cause flooding.  It was odd, because these washes were shown as rivers on the map, but we KNEW we'd been in some of these areas and hadn't seen any water!  We left Phoenix in January, so we never got to see the washes full of water. 

We also did a lot of exploring, and in our exploring, we discovered Old Town Scottsdale.  I believe it was one of the first settled areas in and around Phoenix (but it has been over 2 years, since we were there, so my details are a bit sketchy.)  Now it's a delightful little tourist town, in the middle of the big city of Phoenix!

One of the highlights of our time in Arizona, was a trip to the Grand Canyon, but I have enough to write about that, to make a new entry!