Greetings from Arizona!

Tuomo writes: No, we haven't moved again even though it's been like a month and a half since my last posting... A severe case of blog fatigue I guess...

At any rate, we're down in Arizona on vacation. We flew down on Good Friday after a night in Seattle. The drive down to Seattle was a nuisance and a half of itself because we had to wait over two hours to cross the border; since it was Thursday before Easter weekend on which most Canadians get four days off there must have been more than the usual amount of people wanting to go to the States... At Phoenix Airport, we were greeted by Dave's parents who have been staying in Peoria, a 45 minute drive from the airport, for almost two months.

Let me tell ya: not a cloud in the sky and the temperatures above 20 C (70 F)! What a huge difference it makes in comparison to the weather we left behind in Vancouver. In fact my brother text-messaged me a virtual raspberry in response to my description of the weather here :-)

So far we've seen a "ghost town," or a tourist trap with shops, ateliers, and actors who put on a tableau on what life was like in the Southwest in the late 1900s: lots of smoke and guns banging. I was almost convinced that a scorpion would pounce on me at any given moment... In fact the ghost town was next to a place called Lost Dutchmen. I could in fact almost imagine the following dialogue going on, "'t Is heel heet hier! Waar zijn we eigenlijk? Schatje, zeg maar: wat heb je eens met de kaart gedaan? Zeg me niet dat we weer verkeert zijn! Ik zei toch drie uur geleden dat we aan dat hoge lelijke cactus aan links zou keren hebben!!" :-) [It's very hot here. Where are we after all? Sweetie, tell me: what did you do with the map this time. Don't tell me that we're lost again! I told you three hours ago that we should have turned left at that tall ugly cactus!!] Please correct my Dutch if there are mistakes... :-)

At any rate, the sights have been quite spectacular, to say the least. Unlike the mountaineous British Columbia, the Phoenix area is quite flat (with mountains in the horizon) with cactuses and desert all around. The other day we went on a 90 minute cruise on Lake Saguaro on the Desert Belle, and man was it magnificient! We should do something similar once we get back to BC...

Later on this week, we'll be heading up north to see the Grand Canyon, a long-time dream of mine! More on that and hopefully photos in the near future... In the mean time, wish you were here :-)