Casa Grande Ruins

What a nice sight to start the day!

Barry took me out to the Casa Grande Ruins today.  The main structure is a 4 story building built in about 1350 by the Hohokam Indians.  I was amazed by how straight all the walls are and how square the openings were.

3000 tons of caliche, a concrete like mix of sand, clay and limestone were used to build the walls which are 4 feet thick at the base.

From the Ruins, we went to Florence where my friend Dick spent winters before he pass away.

Barry checked on a steel cactus he likes at this shop and I picked up a little gift for Vera.

I had been seeing these white piles and asked Barry what they were, cotton seed he told me, it is hard to imagine how much cotton it takes to make that much seed.

Mik and James are always talking about In n Out burgers, so I requested them for lunch.  These are our Double Double's, Barry's on the right and mine on the left.  They are good, but you have to put some serious effort into getting your mouth open for a bite.

Barry had a buy one get one free coupon from Culver's which was just across the street from the In n Out, so we went there for dessert.

On the way home, Barry drove me around showing me some of the houses they have looked at and took me through the college grounds.  I spotted this hillside of cactus and had him stop so I could take pictures.  This looks like scenes I have seen in movies of the West when I was a kid.  It has been a long time since I have watched a western.

Barry and Mona are fixing dinner, Barry fired up the barbecue and cooked beef and pork which we had with baked beans, potato salad and rolls.  It all tasted great and I had several helpings.  We watched TV for awhile and Mik came a little later in the evening.  Once again I had a very enjoyable day.

Casa Grande

After breakfast this morning I wandered around the back yard taking pictures.  This is Barry's John Deere Cultivator.

Barry and Mona had a couple of stops to make, this nursery near their place was the first one.  They were having a Saturday Market there today, lots of interesting things to look at.  There are more kinds of cactus than I ever imagined.

Barry took me out to see the Casa Grande RC Flyers field.  It had about a mile of washboard road into it and a shooting range across the road that would get on my nerves after a while.

They took me to the Robson Ranch Grill for lunch, it was a really nice place and the fish and chips are great!

This is a view of their house from the Southwest I think, I had a hard time keeping directions straight down there.  I could probably get lost pretty easily without a GPS.

Can you tell which rock is covering the propane cylinder for the fire pit?  I may have to get one for ours!  I spent part of the afternoon out back taking pictures of the plants.

We sat out and enjoyed the fire pit and the nice evening.  We were treated to a beautiful Sunset before we headed in for the night.

4300 Planes!

We headed out early this morning for the Pima Air Museum, the first stop was for gas which is fairly cheap in Arizona.

We are headed South on Hwy. 10, the speed limit is 75, so everyone is driving about 80.  I saw Pecan orchards, cotton fields and lots of cactus on the way.

When we got to the museum, we signed up for a bus tour of the USAF bone yard across the road at Davis Monthan AFB.  We had half an hour to kill before the tour, so we toured the first building really quick.  Of course I found one of my favorite airplanes the Thunderbirds F-4E Phantom in it.

The bus tour of the bone yard was great, the narrator was a retired USAF pilot who has flown planes from the F-100 to the F-22 Raptor.

 During the tour, the base commander came on the bus and she told us about the 4000 planes they have stored on 2600 acres worth 35 billion dollars.

There is just about every kind of airplane or helicopter you can imagine there.  After we got back to Pima, we had lunch and then continued our tour of the 300 planes there.

This is Barry with the Bumble Bee which was the world's smallest biplane at one time.

There are four football field sized hangers that house 150 aircraft, plus an outside display of another 150 aircraft.  This view is just part of the outside display as seen from the second floor of the B-17 hanger.

This is another view from the B-17 hanger.  Out there a ways is where my camera battery died after about 450 pictures.  Then I had to fall back on the cell phone's camera.

As we were walking around outside we could see A-10s and C-130s practicing at Davis Monthan AFB.

After we got home, Barry had to run to the Phoenix airport to pick up some friends.  Mona showed me around the yard and pointed out all the different types of cactus and plants.  They have done a great job and it was really interesting.

Off to Arizona!

Lots of activity the last few days, but no time to post as I was getting ready to visit Barry in Arizona.  Mik had an NCAA Umpire's meeting in Phoenix and he talked me into coming along to visit Barry for a few days while he was in meetings.  Mik made all the travel arrangements for us, it sure makes it nice to have someone who has lots of travel experience leading you through everything.  This picture is during our layover in San Diego, the sun felt so nice!

 This picture shows San Diego as we were leaving for Phoenix.

You see some interesting shapes from the air, this circle really had me stumped.  I took several pictures of it and there is an airport in the lower left and it looks like oval tracks near and in the circle.  When we went to get our luggage in Phoenix, mine had not made it and they said it would probably be on the next plane in 2 hours.  Barry was waiting to pick me up at the Cell Phone Lot (something I had never heard of until today), I called him and we decided to have something to eat while waiting for the next plane.

This is Mill Ave. in Tempe near Arizona State University where Barry took me to the Gordon Biersch Brewery to eat.  He let Mik know where we were so he could join us after he got his rental car.  The building had a turret that faced the intersection and since we were on the second floor we had a great view of the street.

The food was good and I had a great time.  Mik took this picture of Barry and I.  It only took about 5 minutes to get my bag when Barry and I went back to the airport and we headed for his place.  It felt nice to get my sweats and slippers on when we got there.  We visited for a little while before calling it a night.

Lots of button pushing!

I started moving programming of some models to the new radio that is in the center from the other two, and some from the left one to the right one.  It turned into quite a project and close to 3 hours went by really quick.  It isn't too bad doing airplanes, but the helicopters have lots of parameters that need to be set.  I am putting all the helicopters into the center radio because it is much faster having dual processors, the control signals have 4096 steps to them and it responses in 7 milliseconds.  The left radio has limited programming and is not easy to change from one model to another. When I get done, then I have to test each model that has been moved by flying it and  adjusting the trims.  Not much else went on here unless you count going down for a haircut as exciting.  I did take some cocoa mounds over to Steve and Dianne's and had a nice fun visit there.

Castle Rock Men's Ensemble

The Methodist Church and the Lutheran Church had their annual joint service today at the Lutheran Church.  The Castle Rock Men's Ensemble performed before, during and after the service.  It was a very enjoyable way to start the day.  The rest of the day was spent watching football play of games and looking at model airplane plans.  I found an online site with 6200 planes in PDF format and it took several days to go through them all and download the ones I wanted.  I got tired of sitting and spent part of the evening putting tools away and rearranging in the shop.

2015

This is my last picture of 2014, I was coming in from the shop and the sunset was looking so good that I got my cell phone out and took a couple of pictures.  Tuesday the 30th, we went up to take Marie to a doctor's appointment.  It turned out the doctor's child was sick and the appointment was canceled, but they could not leave a message for Marie because her cell phone was dead as the charger was broken.  After we left there, we tried to find her a charger but could not find one, so I bought her a new phone.  I couldn't get it activated without the old one working, so I took it home to work on the charger.  I managed to get it jury rigged so it would charge and I got it activated Wednesday.  We had a nice quiet New Years Eve, Vera reading and I was getting things ready for flying on New Years Day.

There was lots of frost on the grass when we got to the field about 9:30 New Years day.

Dick was the first one there and had several flights in before we arrived.  The weather couldn't have been any better, there was no wind and lots of sunshine.

I am all set up for my first flight with both heaters going and Vera testing the 12 volt electric throw I got her for Christmas.  I am happy to report it worked great!

With all the layers I had on, it was really comfortable all day.  I'm  getting my helicopter ready to fly, the battery fell out during the flight, so the landing was not pretty but the damage was surprisingly light for falling that far.

We had 18 members show up today, this is after some of them had left.  Leonard is shooting a touch and go with the red and white plane.

Friday the 2nd, we had another indoor flying session at the Centralia Middle School gym.  There were 11 of us there and we flew for about 3 hours.   Today, I got my planes unloaded and took down the last of the Christmas lights.  I took them down Friday, but when we got in the Blazer to go to Centralia, there were the red lights on the bush glowing at us.  We got Marie's new phone delivered to her before the flying session and she was really tickled to have a phone again.  Josh came up this afternoon and we did some work on his radio controlled monster trucks.