The only thing...

that could have made this morning more perfect is if Kevin could have been with us on our spur-of-the-moment-close-to-home-road trip/stock photo shoot instead of working. The weather could not have been more gorgeous. It's the reason we put up with 114 degrees every day, all summer long.

After dropping the small villagers off at school, I grabbed my camera, some extra lenses and headed towards the Superstition Mountains. They are so, so pretty and they call to me daily! I see them looming in the distance every day and I just want to be there instead of my el-lame-o, cement jungle, surburban city. The closer I get to them, the sunnier everything seems! I just love the area so much. Very rural. Horses and barns and rustic spanish style ranches. Kevin tried his hardest to get me to move to AJ with him when we were looking for a house two years ago, but in the end the poor guy gave in (on the first of many things) and moved to Mesa to be with us since that's where the 3 villagers were already enrolled in school. If I didn't hear so often how the schools are such crap in Apache Junction, (the town at the base of the mtn.) I would so much rather have a nice piece of land there than in Mesa. I should take the drive more often, (and by "drive" I mean a whopping 15 or 20 minutes) but I'm usually too lazy to plan ahead (and by plan ahead I only mean, take a bottle of water, some cheerios and an extra diaper for the tiny villager). See how hard that would be to do regularly?

So on our little solo adventure, (the boy and I being like one) the wee one and I took a white-knuckle drive up the side of a mountain with a veeeeerrrry steep drop off, approx. millions of feet straight down. Lucikly there were lots of places to pull over and get some neat shots. Also lucky for me that this is when the little guy takes his daily morning nap. That road and a screaming baby would NOT be a good mix.

We were going to drive to a lake, but the sign said it was still 38 miles away and part of that means crossing a one lane bridge (and I'm so not fond of bridges to begin with, much less one where you have to either take turns or play chicken with oncoming traffic) and then driving on a dirt road. So we ended up just going part way up the mountain and then turning around and going back down.

On our way back thru AJ, we stopped at Goldfield Ghost Town. It was pretty much us, a lot of snowbirds and a few elementary school groups. It was nice to be there on a weekday when nothing was going on.

Some great photo ops and we got to see a huge horse up close and some cowboys! The tiny tot tried to convince me we should visit the Bordello where the madame of the house was at the top of the stairs trying to persuade us, but he might be a little young still!

Hope you had an enjoyable day as well!