“After a thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, we didn’t wake up until the next morning ”  to head west.  Well north and then west.   We are in Beatty Az now, and we pulled up to our usual place off in the desert.  There was another rig there, so we gave them LOTs of space and parked a few hundred yards away.  We were just getting out and looking around when there was a series of gun shots.

Well we are kind of used to this having lived for 13 years in Rural Oregon, but not in this situation.  Our dog is petrified of the sound, and I think we are a bit uneasy…. SO we packed up and moved to the location, in these pictures. In retrospect, I was thinking…… what a great way to keep an area to yourself 🙂  Just fire off several rounds of bullets whenever someone else shows up.

Tucker took all of his toys OUT Of the motorhome, and left them all around, he clearly liked the new “digs” better…..

We actually went to Wickenburg, on Black Friday, shopping for GEODES  🙂 (then we came to Beatty.

Geodes are…. “a rock containing a cavity lined with crystals or other mineral matter.” this is a wonderful article with great pictures to show how they form    GEODES

What we are finding each year we rock hound is that each year we get better at spotting certain characteristics: You can see in this lower left one a bubbly sort of outside… “Botryoidal”, is the geology term for bubbly. 

Sometimes only a few bubbles…

SOME BIG bubbles…

Then PRESTO…..beautiful crystals inside.  Some you crack open and nothing inside. For the most part, we are trying to leave them all intact, so we can cut them properly with a saw when we get to Quartzite… or when we get home.

We are getting back in to Cactus territory, so once again looking for booties for Tucker….. turns out what we are going to need to do is to order them and have them delivered to a USP in a town we are planning on getting to. They are a very specialty item and though stores SAY that they carry them, what they mean is that they can GET THEM IN…. which is not much use to travellers.

Although I failed to get a decent picture, we were recently at a gas station and while wandering around I found a series of bird nests in very prickly cacti… … Could not help but wonder how the little ones learning to fly must be VERY accurate taking off.

Well expect to get some DAZZLING Pictures this year from Brenda. In previous years we could only get SO far out to find rocks, as the motorhome is NOT a 4×4, and we could only go SO far in the bikes, because Tucker would get TUCKERED OUT.

Now we just leave the motorhome on one place and go to all the other places with the Jeep.