We also had a chance to visit our friends Bill and Sharon.  They have a great winter place on a golf course north of town.  I, (Ed), worked with both Bill and Sharon in the Structural Test Lab at Boeing during my first ten years with the company.  We also visited my uncle and aunt, Wayne and Barbara.   They spend their winters in Tucson and return to the Seattle area during the summer.

From Tucson we traveled along I-8 west to Yuma, Arizona.  There are huge areas of sand dunes here.  One of the reasons so many Snow Birds come to Yuma is that they like to ride dune buggies across the dunes all winter.

Usually the desert area in New Mexico and Arizona, is brown with very little green.  On this trip the desert was green, yellow and purple.  While we were on the East coast we heard that the Southwest was having one of the wettest winters on record.  Not flood rains, but constant rain.  (We also heard that Seattle would take back their rain if Southern California would take back their earthquakes.)

The results of all this rain was a great bloom on the desert floor.  As usual this picture can't capture the magnitude and splendor of the color.

Another interesting drive is across the Vallecito Mountains east of San Diego.  Most of these boulders are twenty to thirty feet across.  They are stacked up here in a way that doesn't look natural.  Erosion, as I know it, wears the rocks slowly away.  But here it seems to have washed away finer soils leaving these giant boulders neatly stacked.

Headed due West during sunset is no problem if you have proper "OSHA approved" welding equipment on hand.  When the sun is low in the horizon Max gets out his "Z87.4 approved goggles".  When he's not using them for sun he likes to weld.  So far we've melted some steel, but no good welds yet.

Working with Grandpa is really special.  The boys always look forward to visiting him and his workshop garage.