Cactus, Baby Owl and Hike up 2nd Ridge

Well it’s almost April, so it must be time for cactus pictures.  The cacti in the RV park are gearing up for a spectacular show.  There are many buds.  They get watered so they look better than the ones out in the wild.  This plant is almost always the first to bloom.



The prickly pears have started, as well.



After all the furor over Facebook’s capturing of data (to include phone call logs, if you have it on your phones) I decided to download my Facebook data and see what they have on me.  Precious little as it turns out.  I did recover a couple of good pictures I had forgotten about.



People who have lived much of their lives on Facebook are downloading data and discovering forgotten conversations with ex-lovers, phone numbers of grandparents who were never on Facebook and a ton of stuff they were not expecting to see.  It’s kind of creepy.



We’re seeing a lot of these flowers on the trail.  They also come in a very pretty lilac, but I didn’t get any decent pictures.  The wind was up and they were all waving back and forth in the breeze.



The always lovely ocotillo.



There is a baby Horned Owl in the park.  There is a palm tree that is covered in some sort of vine that seems to be consuming the tree. The parents have nested in the vines and made a baby. 



Here we have the Tucson Mountain Park map again.  See the white bubble pointing at the Yetman trail in three places.  Look to the left of that and up a little, and you can see 2nd Ridge and the trail up there.  We did that hike from the Genser trailhead yesterday.  If you’re in Tucson it’s worth doing.



The view from the top is always enjoyable.



I swiped this from one of the Seattle papers.  Look on the left side at the thing that looks like a mushroom cloud.  That’s what is meant by “scattered rain.”



So I mentioned we might be putting an offer in on a house.  We did.  It was accepted.  We are buying a house.  It’s close to the border of Tucson Mountain Park, so there will be no more development in our immediate area.  The developers are very busy scraping the desert in Oro Valley, and it’s becoming an ant hill of people.  We are planning on keeping the RV for the foreseeable future because there are still places to go, people to see.  April 14 we’re flying to Charlotte NC to rent a U Haul truck and empty out our storage unit.  Yea!!!!!!  Road trip!  I can not tell you how much I am not looking forward to driving across the country.  But hey!  Pictures of new stuff!