New Tires, More Wildflowers

Greetings Earthlings!  We're counting down the days until we are gone from Tucson.  This year, as is usually the case, the last week has filled up with dentists, eye doctors and trying to get the new (very expensive) truck tires to be balanced.  The truck has been back to Jack Furrier once for re-balancing; but the ride was still not good.  We took the truck to Watson Chevrolet and paid for them to do Road Force Balancing.  It's a pretty cool technology.  As it turned out the left rear tire was not going to balance with the addition of more weights.  We took the report in to Furrier, they looked at it and immediately said they'd order a new tire.  We were stunned, I was expecting to have to escalate the issue to a district manager.
Work continues in the Santa Cruz river.  They are now armoring a water control outfall.  They are doing massive work on this.  Why this needed to be done is still a mystery to me.

Friday we took the mountain bikes out to Fantasy Island.  Jim's front tire was not holding air, so he added a syringe full of latex to it.  We recently learned that one is supposed to remove the tires 3 times a year and scrape out the latex.  That's not happening, the latex seal is really difficult to break.  When they get too full of old latex, I'm paying for that maintenance.  Anyway, we needed to ride the bikes to distribute the new latex in the tire.  A church has purchased part of the state trust land and is now scraping the desert preparatory to putting up a new church.  I personally think we have enough churches and not enough mountain bike trails.  The Bunny Trail has been relocated by the construction zone. 

Someone has left this inside the fence at Fantasy Island.  It may be a commentary on the church construction, or it may just be a marker for the Bunny Trail.

Today was day two of blowing the dog of the chain winds.  There is a high pressure system in the north, and a low pressure system to the south and they are rubbing against each other and making wind from the east.  Enough already!  We hiked since it was too windy to ride.  The poppies are out.  This is the highest concentration that we have seen out there.

The jojoba is out, as well.  (Actually, I am wrong, fooled by the pictures of plants posted by the Marriott Resort alongside the trail.  The yellow bushes are brittlebush.)

It was 92 degrees in Phoenix today.  We are heading up there next Monday for seven days.  One fervently hopes that the temperatures will return to their normal range before we arrive.  We're going to ride a bunch of trails for a week.  We're back here through Easter and then we are gone as of  April 6.  We will be heading west.