Company

What an enjoyable week we’ve had! Not only has the weather been back into the temperatures we expect in an Arizona winter,we’ve also had company. I remember when a friend of ours moved from Wichita to Sedgwick, the distance of about 20 miles, she told me that it seemed to be farther from Wichita to Sedgwick than the other way. Her friends were reluctant to drive “that far” for a visit but thought nothing of asking her to come to their house. Moving to Yuma for the winter is a lot farther from friends than that 20 mile drive, but while we would drive to Tucson or another distant town to see friends, few are so inclined to come see us here. This week was different.
Our friends Phil and Pat Cox from Arkansas are in Green Valley visiting her daughter and they called this week to see if they could drive over to visit us! Our answer was YES, of course! Now that we have both a park model and an RV, we even have overnight guest space. We showed them Yuma, including our favorite fish taco stand, a driving tour past miles of vegetable fields (did we ever tell you that Yuma is the winter lettuce capital of the world?) and took them to Martha’s Gardens, a date farm and store where we made sure they had a date shake. Our neighbors were gathering for breakfast at AmVets the next morning, so we took Coxes with us and joined them. Good food, good prices and good company.

After Phil and Pat left for home, we had another welcome visitor. We first met Lindsay Tempro when she was a student nurse working as summer staff at Golden Bell camp in the summer of 2014. She and her fellow “camp nurse” set up a table right outside the gift shop to provide campers their morning or noon or evening medications and when they were between patients, one or both would come into the gift shop just to talk when I was working there. Occasionally they both came over to the bus and visited us, so we got pretty well acquainted. In January, Lindsay sent me a message and said that she had a contract as a traveling nurse in Phoenix for a few months and Malia was helping her drive out. We weren’t able to get together while Malia was here, but Lindsay drove down Thursday to see us. It was like having one of our grandkids drop in for a visit! We went to Da Boyz pizza/Italian restaurant in downtown Yuma, in an old Kress store building.

We also took her across the state line into California to show her the enormous Imperial sand dunes. And took time for another selfie back home!

We sent her on her way Friday afternoon with the leftover pizza from the night before and instructions to stop at Dateland (milemarker 67) for a date shake. Are you sensing a pattern here? We love our date shakes and I think we’ve become pushers!
We closed the week out by picking up a few tubs of clothing from Jessie’s Closet to be washed and resorted. More volunteer hours for Jonah’s Eagle Scout project!