Quick Trip to Texas from Arizona

Bibi and I visited a local music festival the following week.  It was a LOCAL (mainly from Arizona) talent affair with multiple stages and performers.  My favorite part was the workshops on various subjects offered during the day.  We also had a great time parking ourselves under the shade trees to listen to various musicians jam.  One very interesting character played the banjo with his dog’s leash looped around one ankle and his macaw/parrot perched on his shoulder.  All this while he was picking and singing a song.  He and a blind fiddler made some awfully pretty music together.

As you can tell, I am pretty easy to entertain.  Bibi snapped this picture of me listening to these two and commented that she could tell I was having the time of my life.  I responded by letting her know, that was the truth and I was as relaxed as I could possibly be.

Jam Session

Macaw on Banjo picker's shoulder with blind fiddler in pink shirt

Enjoying the session along with the little one next to me

She and I attended a Dulcimer workshop after this particular jam session and were pleasantly surprised to see familiar faces.  A husband and wife, who work at the McSpadden Dulcimer shop in Mountainview, AR, led the workshop.  Come to find out, they ‘winter’ in the Phoenix area each year and are annual participants in this particular festival.

Dulcimer workshop leaders from Mountain View, AR

Of course, when you have an all-volunteer staff and performance lineup, you get the good with the bad.  We had to actually take our leave of a couple of performances to save our sanity, not to mention our ears.  All-in-all it was a wonderful day and a great change of pace.

We made a trip to the Phoenix Botanical Gardens one evening to see a special light show.  An artist, Bruce Munro, has taken Fiber Optic Lights and decorated certain areas of the garden.  Each night only a certain number of tickets are sold to keep crowds and crowding done for visitors.  The attraction is quite something to see once it gets dark.

Interestingly, the colors are more vivid in photographs than in person.  This is one time, you get a better picture than seeing the display in person.  Usually a two dimensional photo is not as good as the real three dimensional view your eyes see.  Not so in this case and so I will let the pictures below speak for themselves.

We are getting things packed up because we are leaving on a jet to Texas and will not return to Phoenix until the day before we pull out.  We are making a very quick trip to Longview and Melissa to see family, keep four doctor appointments and complete three tax returns; all in a seven day period.  We enjoyed the time there and had a great time with everyone, even if it was a hurried time.

Arriving back in Phoenix, our airport taxi drivers (David and Sophie) picked us up and carried us back home to the RV.  We spent the next day cleaning and prepping for the move.  We are leaving to visit a park on the Colorado River located right on the Arizona/California state line.