Wrapping up a third trip

We’re wrapping up our third (and probably final) trip to Arizona during this pandemic. The last few days we were lowkey...just hanging out at Laura’s pool and at the Omni. We’re excited to get back to Illinois and get back into our routine. Swim and tennis are starting back up. But our last few days were great. We had smoothies at Omni and the girls found some huge beetles. We brought one home
for our bug collection. The girls had so much good quality cousin time. We’re grateful for this time together...we’ll probably never have this opportunity again. And soon Laura and Jeff are coming to Illinois. We’ll be happy to show them what we do to pass the time in Illinois.

La Paloma Pool

Since Laura and Jeff are members at La Paloma we definitely had to visit and have a little fun with the water slide. It also gave us some crazy views of the big horn fire...as well as watching all the forestry air drops to contain. Literally every three to four minutes we watched a plane or helicopter perform a drop. There were several families at the pool who were guests that had evacuated their homes. We treated ourselves to some gelato on the way home...because why not?!?!

Mt. Lemmon

Picture overload...but we had an amazing day in the Coronado National Forest. We drove up to Mt. Lemmon and spent about 3 hours hiking the Marshall Gulch. Starting elevation was 7500, up to 8300 and then back down. Fortunately we got to take a break midway. Mitch got a work call so a huge climbing rock made a perfect rest stop. The views of the bighorn fire burning were crazy. Severe tears back most of Summerhaven and Mt. Lemmon burned in a forest fire. They’ve already closed the Pima Canyon and Finger Rock areas of the Catalinas, and evacuated people from homes. The girls are seeing so much that they’d never see in Illinois and really seemed to enjoy this hike. We rewarded ourselves with giant chocolate chip cookies from the Cookie Cabin!

Ironwood Picture Rocks

So I picked a trail for us to hike this morning. We wanted Aunt Laura to hike with us...Macy bailed, but we got it done. We did the Ironwood Forest Picture Rocks Hike in Saguaro National Park. Not much for elevation...the petroglyphs were awesome. But overall we give it two thumbs down. We were waking in sand for the majority of it. Our legs will be feeling this hike tomorrow. Not too mention it wasn’t marked very well and we got off course twice. Oh well, we had some laughs and certainly enjoyed the company. And the girls certainly earned their Starbucks treat!