We interrupt this vacation... Aunt Pam's surgery

My beautiful little sister had a health crisis over the last few days. She was having a lot of pain on her right side and when she got it checked out they saw a mass on her ovary that was suspicious.


Long story short and many more tests later, she had laparoscopic surgery this morning. The mass on her ovary was malignant so she had a complete hysterectomy. The surgeon said it was stage one and NOT the kind of cancer that is lethal...this one is malignant but behaves benign, in that it is "encapsulated" and does not spread. She is expected to make a full recovery and no further treatment will be necessary as long as the pathology reports come back with clear lymph glands.

We sure do love you, sis, and pray for a quick recovery!!!!

Our Beloved Cabin

Warm temps, long mountain views, boys wrestling in the yard.... Does it get any better than this???

To North Carolina....blowout!

Dave accepted a contract position in San Antonio and will begin work on March 10th. We left the rig in a GREAT RV park there and we will stay with him while he works, returning to Florida every couple of months for a month.

So with all these logistics taken care of, we left "San Antone" to head to our cabin in North Carolina to check on things since it may be awhile before we can get back. Last night we had a blowout on the interstate. Dave "control crashed" the truck into the inside median. The blowout was on the left front tire. How scary! What is even more mysterious is we had a blowout on the same tire one year ago. We need to figure out why we are repeatedly blowing tires on the same wheel. If anyone has any ideas please leave a comment. We will put pics up in the next day or so.

We waited for almost 3 hours, in the dark, in the interstate, in freezing temps, for the tow. The tow towed us to the next exit and put on our spare. We couldn't change the tire ourselves because we were stuck in mud from our "landing" :-).

So we are having tires replaced and catching up on schoolwork and the blog in a hotel and feeling pretty blessed!

San Antonio, redux...

Two days of 400+ miles each, whew! This is what we did Friday (2/22) and Saturday. But it was beautiful! We told jokes, laughed, and stopped at "look-it" sights along the way. And the boys also managed a little rip-sticking in the meantime too :-)

We're scouting out possible places to stay long-term as Dave might have a client here in San Antonio.

Tucson, redux...

Grand Canyon

(Driver Daddy here...) This is such a cool route that we can't possibly show it all in this one little map, so if you want to zoom in, look at the satellite shots, and see for yourself, click on this link. For instance, trace the goat path we took from Cottonwood ("A") thru the mountains to Jerome at a 1 mile or less resolution (on the link it's "E" for the roundtrip). Yikes! But it was fun and beautiful too.

Our last visit to the Grand Canyon was September 2004. It was still very hot and the Canyon was a vast desert. What a difference the season makes! As we journeyed west, we watched the weather for the Grand Canyon range from 8 to 22. So we started the excuses about our Florida-thin blood and consoled ourselves that our RV just isn't winterized. But then we saw some upward directin in the mercury, we decided that we could park the rig south and just go for it on a day-trip. Even though it snowed that week, we found a perfect day to visit with temps in the 40's. That's downright balmy compared to what we saw at the beginning of the trip. Here we are -- your intrepid Rislers -- at the southern rim!

Here's gang going up the stairs of the watchtower that provides 270 degree views of the canyon. It looks ancient, but it was built this way so that it would blend in with the area.

"Sedona is Like Living in the Grand Canyon"

That's all we could keep saying, "Do these people realize that it's like living *inside* the Grand Canyon?"

Apache Junction to Dead Horse Ranch State Park

Weird names, eh? Today we left the KOA in Phoenix on our way to the Grand Canyon. Well, a little bit south of the the GC because it's snowing there and very cold. But it was a gorgeous route and we're at a GORGEOUS state park.


As we set up the camper, the kids pulled out their rip-sticks (2-wheeled skateboards) and explored the nice pavement at the park. Then we loaded up and took the scenic Red Rock Loop to Sedona.

Checkout this satellite image and the terrain map:

Our little excursion from the park to Sedona looked like this above.

The Green-Dotted Roads to Phoenix

Thursday, Valentine's Day. Although we hated to leave that beautiful state park, what a better way to spend the day than driving the ROMANTIC back roads to Phoenix?

Day 2 at Old Tucson & the Desert Museum

Then we were off to the desert museum, which is really more of an zoo with walk-in aviaries (cage-nets for birds).



Look closely at this picture. It's a wild hummingbird gathering nectar outside the aviary!

Old Tucson Day 1

(Daniel here) Monday (Febuary 13th) we got to Tucson and the Saguaro National Monument. You should have seen all the saguaros, with some being an inch high to most being taller than a house, their arms reaching in all directions. They literally covered the landscape. And we camped right in the middle of them! If you plan to do this part of the trip, we have to recommend the Gilbert Ray State Park Campground.

After setting up the camper, we went to Old Tucson Studios, one of the places John Wayne filmed most of his many motion pictures.

When we got to the front desk they told us we were entitled to a two-day ticket since it was already late in the afternoon. Besides, we'd need more time get a full tour of the park. We came across an old train that once ran on coal (I got a sample from the pile for my rock collection) and we got several pictures of it.

After that we went and jumped on a the tour train (under which I had previously flattened a penny) that took us all around the studios.

After getting off, we went back to the place we had got on and retrieved my penny. It was very warped, but wasn't flattened like a real train would do. Then we watched a cool reenactment of a bank robbery from the movie Deathwish, complete with shotgun and revolver shots. I was really cool.

It got late, though, so we had to leave to get back to the camper. But we had one more treat before we called it a day. See, one of our friends, Miss Patte, has been asking us to take a picture for her of a moose on this trip. While we were buying some salt water taffy, we discovered our prize -- albeit a little-less lively than we'd hoped.

We had a great time and I could hardly wait to go back the next day.

Short Jaunt to an Oasis

(Dad's turn) On Monday, 2/11, we didn't make it that far down the road (only 62 miles) before we stopped, set the chock blocks, and rolled out the slide. We'd planned to just come to Lake Patagonia for a picnic before proceeding up to Tucson. Wow, this is really a gem. We found a great back-in slot at the head of a birding trail with an awesome view of the lake. (Note: this is a big phobia for us since we've been picking RV places based on whether they have "pull-thru slots" available.) Usually Paula directs me as I pull into a parking slot for the night, but this time we tried something different: I directed and Paula pulled right back into it. It's a little bit of a slope (3 leveler blocks), so we couldn't even disconnect from the 5th wheel. If any of you have seen our rig connected, you can imagine that's quite a slope to live on! But it was pretty funny too. The boys pretended we were capsizing and had a big time with our predicament.

We decided to explore the park and take a tour of the small museum they have here. The boys got to hear about the more than 250 species of birds that live in this area. They also had some native snakes, a gila monster, and some guest corn snakes (non-native) too.

They were really excited when they saw this display because it looked like their favorite Perigrin Falcon, but it turned out to be a closely-related cousin, the Grey Hawk. It's a beautiful bird with grey feathers.As we left the museum, we got within 10 yards to a real-live Perigrin. He just sat there and looked into the camera before SWOOOPING off.

Right before sundown, we went on a nice hike along the nature trail in front of our campsite. We listened to the swooping red-winged blackbirds against the reeds of the lake as they hunted insects. It was unreal -- it sounded like we were at the beach and waves were crashing against the shore. (I wanted to post a video to our blog, but this feature doesn't seem to be working correctly). We also caught glimpses of some deer in the woods.

As it started to get dark, we made our way back to our campsite and cooked up some hot dogs, beans, and s'mores.
It was a chilly night, but we cuddled up to the fire, and talked, laughed, as the stars came out against a black velvet sky. It was truly magical end to another magical day on the road.