Knittinggarden

I'm back here in the lovely, cold and rainy Pacific Northwest.  We arrived shortly after the middle of April in order to welcome our first grandson.  You might remember seeing some baby knitting that I did over the last few months.  That will have to suffice because, following parents' orders, we aren't allowed to post photos of the little guy on social media.  He's well, growing fast, and I've seen him wearing a hat or two that I made. Now to the adventure part of the story.  I don't remember if I've blogged about all the trips my sister and I have taken to our favorite spa in St. George, UT, but I think I wrote about our last trip three years ago.  We go on major birthdays, and this time it was one of hers.  To make this time even more special, The Princess came with us for the first three nights.  The spa is great; we always stay a week and get the package that includes hiking, exercise classes, meals, and one spa treatment a day.  I'm n...

As I documented last time, we've been going on hikes about every week this winter.  This week we added a day trip to Joshua Tree National Park to our weekly outdoor activities and it was a lot of fun. I had read in the paper last Sunday that the Joshua Trees were in bloom and were very abundant this year.  Not having been to the park in about 20 years, and never having seen a tree in bloom, we asked some friends to go and drove up there last Monday morning.  We drove east to the far entrance to the park, entered there, and then drove diagonally across the whole thing, stopping when we saw something interesting. This garden of Cholla cacti was impressive. They were in various stages of bloom and were really pretty.  The color of the flower is not as eye catching as the Beaver tail pink blossom but I loved the pale green, delicate blossoms. We passed some amazing rock formations and stopped to take photos of this one that looks like a skull. ...

We try to go on a hike on Sunday mornings and today was a good one.  Here in Palm Desert the mountains seem to come right down to the road, so it's not hard to find a hiking trail near home.  The trails nearest us are very popular this time of year and get pretty crowded, so we usually go a little farther afield.  This morning we drove about 20 minutes away to the place I call my favorite hike.  You just park and pretty much start walking uphill, then decide whether to continue on a road to the top, or veer off in another direction onto a smaller trail. Today we decided to go check out a new dam that was being built during the last couple of years and is finished now.  It was quite a project and now protects the main highway between all of the little cities here (Hwy 111) from washing out every time there's significant rain. We struck out to the left and went around the side of the hill until we arrived at a vantage point above the dam.  Then we decided...