My aunt, K was having a New Years celebration at her mom's house. This is in a veeery small town in Arizona. It is also the first town I ever lived in. (Don't worry, I have a second post coming that will include pictures of the super awesome trailer I lived in.) If you open the above picture you can see all of the bails of cotton that had recently been harvested. My dad said it must have been a good year because the cotton bails were plentiful and quite close together.

Pistachio groves.
My mom told me that these trees were planted around the time I was born.

A pistachio mustachio.
These are pistachios, fresh off of the tree.

It was cold... not "I'm just a wussy Desert Rat" kind of cold. There was a chill to the air and it never did get above 45. The wind whipping made geocaching uncomfortable. Luckily we found roads that led us within feet of the caches were searched for. You can't tell how truly cold it was. But it was nothing compared to the next day.

Standing near an old mine house and geocache on Thursday.

On Friday, late morning, we headed out to see some sights. We rode in two trucks and a jeep. Our destination was a little area that my mom's family used to go to to have dutch oven barbeques on Saturday afternoons back in the 70s.

Looking out onto the valley where my Grandpa used to farm. Far off in the distance are mountains, actual mountains with snow on them.

Gwennie thought this rock looked like a mushroom.

When we were at the special play area, I could see how much fun kids would have, how much fun I would have had as a kid. There were tons of rocks to climb on, and I love climbing on rocks. (Rhayn is in the below picture, as well as one of my cousin's kids.) Once again it was so cold that I had a hard time enjoying myself at all. Gwennie found a really cool rock and was carrying it back to the truck. The cold made her hands hurt and she started crying. I carried her cool rock while she whined about her hands. She and I ended up sitting in my parents' truck to keep out of the wind.

Rhayn sitting in a hunters chair.

Saguaro cactus with a cool nest. It looks like an eagle nest to me.

After the frigidly cold rock play we drove through the desert some more to see other things. My uncle led us to some sort of water retention pond that had the hunting chair set up near it. We saw many beautiful saguaros, and the tallest ocotillos I've ever seen. The saguaros, my mom said, seemed short in comparison. Its possible that (according to my dad) the soil in this area is perfect for ocotillos but not perfect for saguaros. Near my parents house it is the opposite, the saguaros tower over the ocotillos.

I am also still suffering from congestion from that miserable cold. The freezing temperatures did not help that at all.