Verde River and a Bobcat

I had another conference call, education session with APQS (manufacturers of my longarm machine) about 10am--it was very interesting and made me ready to get home to that machine and start quilting again.

After lunch we took a drive, just up the road from the entrance to this park is another US Forest Service recreation area called Verde River Needle Eye. You drive this winding road for 6 miles and all of a sudden you are in the middle of nowhere and there is a huge river and massive boulders. The actual Needle Eye in the huge boulders is very impressive but hidden by a grove of palo verde trees. Totally unexpected, all that water in Arizona!

After the drive we hit McDonald's for an ice cream. We had invited our friends Arch and Gwen and Roy and Sandy to have dinner with us tonight in Cave Creek. On the way to the restaurant, we stopped by a house we saw yesterday that was totally unfinished, it only has the outer walls and roof done with particle board, nothing else. While we were walking around inside the house looking at where all the rooms should be, I happened to look up and on a ledge above my head was a huge cat watching us--well, we looked a little closer, it was a bobcat!!!!! He was beautiful and just watched us as we walked around.

Verde River and the huge boulders.

A bird in the river, will have to get the bird book out, feel free to chime in Ellie!

Michael and I spent a sleepless night wondering about purchasing property here and both of us decided almost simultaneously that it just wasn't a good time. We are so lucky to have the kind of life we do and it doesn't make sense to go into that much debt at this time, maybe when we sell our property near Billings.

We enjoyed our great dinner at Harold's in Cave Creek with our friends and we said our sad goodbyes--Michael and I are starting north tomorrow. Blog posting may be spotty for the next few days.