What a Week!

Happy Easter everyone.

We were sooo busy last week. Our son Eric flew down to visit us for two days of his spring break.



On Monday we drove to St. Anthony Greek Orthodox Monastery. It is such a beautiful place, and so peaceful, even though this is Holy Week and there were many pilgrims and other visitors. Eric took what seemed like a million pictures.We took quite a few, but not as many as he did because we had visited last year. Here is a link to the blog I posted then.

On Tuesday we drove to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, one of the Arizona State Parks. As I have shown in several blogs, the desert is very green this spring because of all the rain we have received. Now the wild flowers are blooming along the highways and many of the plants and trees at the Arboretum were in bloom.

Aren’t these poppies great?



The lupine are also blooming.



The pink flowers remind us of the fireweed we saw in Alaska, though we don’t know if it is really the same flower.



I took lots of pictures at the arboretum, but I didn’t write down the names of any of the plants. So here are some of those I took. Click on the photo and you will see the whole album.

Spring flowers

We worked an extra shift at Casa Grande Ruins Wednesday morning to help with 56 children from the Santa Rosa School on the Tohono O'Odham who are in kindergarten through second grade. We don’t have a lot of experience teaching grade school students, but we had lots of help leading the children through the Junior Ranger activities.



And we had a good time. These three girls took turns wearing John's hat.



On Thursday we were hit by a tsunami of junior high students, probably 250.



Between those students and other visitors, the Ruins had a total of 7 tours. It was quite an experience…the most difficult day we’ve ever experienced as volunteers.

We have finished our three-month volunteer assignment. In a couple of days we will be off to be tourists for nine months. I’ll share lots of interesting sights as we travel along.