John and his crew have been working hard this week and earned themselves some extra time off. What is the first thing John wants to do? Go rockhounding. First order of business, breakfast!
Matt’s Big Breakfast was first on my list, but when we got there, people were lined up around the corner, yeah this isn’t going to happen. We prefer to eat at local restaurants over big box if we can. You get the local flavor. In my search for another establishment I found Mel’s Diner. You can’t get more local than this.
I had no idea Arizona was the setting of one of my favorite childhood TV shows!
Well kiss my grits!!! They had all kinds of fun memorabilia around the restaurant.
The order up window where you could see Mel sticking his head out to yell at the girls…awe memories. I wonder if TV Land ever shows the re-runs?
There were plenty of photos of the gang hanging on all of the walls.
The food was good and we left with full bellies and a full wallet. The prices were very reasonable.
Now we were ready for some hiking and rock pickin.
Our picking site was just outside of Palo Verde, AZ. That means we were about 25 miles just outside of everywhere. That is the thing about the Midwest…everything is so big it looks closer than it really is and towns just aren’t close together.
As we approached the picking site there was a “forest” of the Saguaro cacti. This is what I think of when I picture Arizona, red rock and BIG cacti.
The small cacti can be quite formidable too. Not going to be touching this guy.
We drove the Jeep as far as we could towards where John wanted to pick and then we walked.
He points to a formation in the distance and says “there!” I say, that is a really long way away. He says “Nah, it just looks that way.” As we are about half way there John says “Wow, it is farther away than I thought.” Hmmmm. We didn’t find much of anything at that spot, so we hiked to a different one.
We sat down to rest at the new site and to survey the area. John looked around and said “I want to go over there.” I told him, “Go ahead, I’ll wait here.”
Take a look at the upper right hand corner rock formation. Doesn’t look that far does it?
Look again, same place and you should see John. He is thinking he looks all badass and stuff right about now. The bigness of everything is deceiving.
How about that Saguaro cactus in the picture. It doesn’t look big, or far away, but these things are HUGE! See the bird nest in this one?
We are just puny human’s.
We had a really great day, and eventually found some cool rocks John wants to turn into bottle stoppers. It was nice to be out hiking around in our favorite state so far, other than our home state of PA.
