Ah well! It is a name “we” have given to the site of the dwellings of an ancient culture in north central Arizona. We call the people Sinaqua which is Spanish for “without water.” They irrigated crops and built masonary, above ground, dwellings. They lived here from perhaps 1100 to 1400 AD and were long gone when the Spanish entered the valley in 1583. The most interesting thing to me was that they didn’t put doors into their houses. They entered through the ceiling. I guess that would keep you fit! Oh yes Tuzigoot is Apache for “Crooked Water” and relates to an oxbow shaped lake in the area. Go figure!
Judy and I moved our camp 17 miles on Friday to Dead Horse Ranch State Park. Â…and no I don’t know how it got that name! The big difference is “Trees.” We are finding that commercial parks are big gravel parking lots. People stay inside and watch cable TV except when they go out to walk their dogs. State parks are campgrounds with character and trails and people who sit outdoors in the afternoon and say howdy when you walk by. We also managed to tune up our tandem bicycle and get in a 16 mile ride in the afternoon. We went to Clarkdale and watched the Verde Canyon Railroad excursion train leave on it’s afternoon round trip up the Sycamore Canyon. They have two of the last 12 operating F7 diesels in the country. (Yes Neil, I got you a couple of photos.) After a huge lunch in Su Casa of Clarkdale we dropped by the Tuzigoot National Monument and walked around those ruins for an hour.
Saturday dawned sunny with a beautiful sunrise through the mesquite trees. We broke camp and ran through our getting-underway checklist and then drove into the big city, Phoenix. We picked out a Wal-Mart store convenient to Judy’s Niece, Wanda and did our shopping and visited with Wanda and her family. We also got to visit with the manager of the Wal-Mart store. We were able to reassure him that we did not intend to camp overnight and the City of Glendale could breathe easy that their upscale living would not be sullied by mere vagabonds.
We continued on to Congress Arizona and checked out an Escapee’s park that we just purchased a membership in. It is a lot out of the way, It has no cell phone or wireless service. It is a very large gravel parking lot with a few trees around the fringes. In addition the road to the nearest town is high-speed, narrow and has no shoulder at all. We are ready to go right back to Dead Horse Ranch State Park!
It is November 2 and I am going to try to send this off and get my e-mail today. That will mean going to town. Judy’s sister Sonja has come over to visit from Lake Havasue City. That means for a day or two we have wheels to get to town and find a place to get on-line. We have set up all our financial stuff on line, and now we have a dependency to get on line to pay bills and we do a lot of shopping on-line. We have found a cell-phone hot spot however. We just need to go out behind the trailer, face East, stand on our left foot and hold our right hand straight in the air. It works every time.