Setting Up for a State Completion

 All Over Arizona

When you roll out of van, make coffee, and go look at birds...

Arizona Road Trip

For the past two days we have been road tripping Arizona.  We had about an 8 hour drive to complete all but 1 county so we stuck a night camping in the middle and made it a really nice 2 day drive.  We saw tons of great birds including Vermilion Flycatchers, Phainopeplas, a lone Crissal Thrasher, and Gambol's Quail to name a few.  The weather was pretty perfect for camping.  High of about 75 and low of about 45.  The drive was really pretty too so it was a win all around.

Our site was pretty awesome and we didn't have ALL of our stuff with us.

They even had a dog park

with a swing

The sky was beautiful just before sunset the first day.

Fire pits for The Insta!

Part of the beautiful drive

We saw a lot of cotton bales.

On the drive back we stopped by Barrio Brewing Co for lunch.  It's the oldest craft brewery in Arizona.

The beers were solid and it was Taco Tuesday.

One more tiny county on the border of Mexico left.  We will get this one when we do a day trip to Nogales MX next month.

Our travel mapping shows some good miles.  The lower loop on the right was this most recent road trip.

We also blew past Missouri in miles.  We will pass Montana and maybe Idaho before this leg of our trip is over.

That's it for today.  If you missed A Pinball Tournament in a Furniture Store, check it out.

Settled in Albuquerque

 Albuquerque, NM

*not a selfie

Eating Local

Today we finished getting settled, did some more grocery shopping, and got take out for dinner. 

We started out waking up from a great sleep.  It is so quiet in the neighborhood we are staying and the temperature is perfect for sleeping.  It's going to be a relaxing month I think.

We finished getting organized and unpacked and there is plenty of space for our stuff which is great.  Later in the afternoon we went grocery shopping at El Super again.  Donna picked a few recipes off newmexico.org's recipe list.

We needed New Mexico Red Chilis for a dish and these looked close to the Google search.  Later I found the real chilis and put these back.  The downside is we had to buy about 5x the amount we needed.  I guess we have a month to use them all.

November 1st is Dia De Los Muertos and we are going to get one of these to celebrate.  Eat local!

We also bought 5 for $4 pastries for "lunch" when we got back.  They were great.

When we got home we quickly realized that nothing we were making was going to be done in time for dinner.  We (I say we but Donna ended up doing most of the work) had to make broth and green sauce which took a few hours.  We decided to get take out for dinner tonight.  I drove across town to get great Mexican food at El Paisa Taqueria.  It is a cash only place and the food is very cheap.

There was a nice man selling things in the eating area of the restaurant

So I bought fresh chicharrons.  

The rest of the evening was cooking, eating great Mexican food, and watching PBS.  So far we are having a very relaxing stay which is needed because Denver was GO GO GO.

The end result of our all day cooking is a double recipe of green chili sauce for 2 recipes we have planned.

The blue counties are all of the new counties for this trip.  We hope to grab a few more surrounding counties before we leave and we will get 2 more on the way out in November.

Our New Mexico Highway Map is getting some miles too.  We are up to 443 miles in NM now.

That's it for today.  If you missed There's A New Mexico, check it out.  Homer Simpson was right, there is a new Mexico.

More BDI Ice Cream & Leo Mol Sculpture Garden

 Winnipeg, MB

At the BDI Mural

Winding Down

Today we went to BDI Ice Cream again.  We had to visit at least one more time while we are here.  Our last visit was great.  This time we got reasonably sized ice creams and didn't end up taking many photos.  

After Ice Cream we headed over to Assiniboine Park to visit The Leo Mol Sculpture Garden.  It wasn't the grand contemporary art kind of sculpture garden but rather the naked women, clothed men, and bears type of sculpture garden.  We also visited the English Garden which was way better IMHO.  There were tons of flowers and we even saw our first hummingbirds in a long time (for us).  

Just a naked woman working on her abs.

I wish there were more like this.

That was pretty much it for today.  We did have a small adventure yesterday to Half Pints Brewing to have a beer and play pinball.  I got to talk to the brewery about beer and Winnipeg and other stuff.  It was a nice trip and the beers were great.

Things are pretty dead around here.  It's Labour Day Weekend here in Winnipeg and I guess everyone heads to The Lake for one last hurrah before school starts and summer ends.  

I did notice the other day that we ended up getting 2 more county equivalents when we went to Assiniboine Downs.  One was pretty obvious after looking at our route but we entered one by entering a clover loop while switching highways.  The line runs right along the highway so the loop takes you into the next county equivalent.  Pretty fun (for me).

The highway obscures the line so I drew it in black to show what I am talking about.

We only have 3 real days left here so things are slowing down.  We are really looking forward to our road trip through ND, SD, and NB on our way to Denver and then our month in Denver will be fun.  We have friends there and we have a couple of friends flying out to hang with us (and other people, but mostly us I tell myself).

If you missed 5 Pin Bowling check it out.  You'd think it would be half the price of "real" bowling but it isn't.

The Corn and Apple Festival

 Morden, MB

Free Corn in Morden!

This morning Donna and I did the 1.5 hour drive to Morden, MB.  Morden is about 20 minutes from the US border just above a city in North Dakota that you have never heard of.  The festival was in Downtown Morden so the streets were closed and we got to see all of the shops.  Donna learned of this festival by reading the local newspaper and the article wasn't about festivals, it was about Morden trying to because an urbanist walkable place.  

Morden has the tree lined streets going on so that's a good start.

Or festival visit started off with the the craziest petting zoo you ever did see.

It's like they got all of the animals in the area and chose the ones that had the smallest chance of biting children or each other and put them in a giant pen full of screaming running kids.

Li'l Sebastian!

We learned a lot about this tortoise from its child handler.  We learned that the pyramids on the back of the shell wear down in the wild due to sand storms.

Once we found the main drag of the festival we had to get our bearings.  

FREE CORN AND APPLE JUICE!  That is what we are here for.

We drove 1.5 hours for a free $0.25 CDN ear of corn.  We walked up to the free corn area but we were an hour early so we had to wait.

We walked through the craft area.  /start sarcasm I am sure these are licensed /end sarcasm.

We wondered if these colorful gals were Mennonites.  Usually you don't see that much party on the lower half when the upper half is so conservative.

We found BeaverTails in Canada!  We have only ever seen them in the Canada Pavilion at EPCOT.

The free corn was a bit crazy at opening

 so we thought we would kill some more time at a brewery

I got a very nice IPA

We ordered cheese fries and they arrived I felt it was a very small serving of fries with cheese but it turned out to be a reasonable serving of cheese cut in the shape of fries and fried.  They were delicious.

We both liked the Marathon Pizza sign.

We visited the Quality Canadian Milk stand.

We received tiny milkshakes for free!

The corn was cooked with a 1916 case steam engine courtesy of the Pembina Threshermen's Museum

The Steam Engine

The machine in back is actually shucking the corn and dumping it out into buckets waiting to be boiled.

They boiled the corn in batches for 8 minutes and then moved to those crates to serve to us.

When the 8 minute boil was done they passed out the corn and then the process started over again so the line moved in groups.

They claim this is the freshest corn you can get.  It was picked this morning and then they say they flash freeze it until it is ready to be shucked.  We couldn't actually confirm it was frozen going into the shucking machine.

But we could confirm that the corn was delicious!  A little oil and salt made it even more delicious.

We left with 3 ciders

And honey as well as chokecherry jam.

We added some more miles to our Manitoba Highways.  We are up to 240 miles now.

We also ticked off a few more County Equivalents in Manitoba.

That was it for today.  If you missed Farmers Market and Thrifting, you can find it via the link.