Travel Blog

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We had our second-to-last game last night, and we had a bit of drama. It seems our cook was caught drinking some beer in the bathroom, so he's history. Luckily, we have only one game left (tomorrow), and it's a pretty tame one, so we hope. Plus, we have some excellent RV'ers in the kitchen who weren't quite fond of the main cook anyway, so I think we'll be ok. And even if we're not, who cares? It's our last game. Did I say "yay" yet?

We think we may actually have Easter plans this year. We forgot it was Easter, though, and sort of invited ourselves to someone's home, so Phil has to call his folks tonight and see if they want us on a holiday. If so, maybe our Easter meal will be better than our usual convenience store fare.

We had our one and only night game last night, playing the Dodgers. It was a televised game, so it was a full house, and it was the usual chaos, but now that we have the hang of things, we just roll with it. Since the Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn, and the A's are from Oakland, we had a bunch of hungry Californians to feed. I was helping out on the front lines when Phil comes up to me and goes, "Go see if you think that's the guy from The Cutting Edge in Mike's line." I wander down there, and what do you know!? It was D.B. Sweeney from The Cutting Edge. Now, you may not know who he is, but Phil and I love that dumb, little figure skating movie. Neither of us said anything to him because we're just not like that. Ok, Phil did talk to him. He told Sweeney he couldn't buy two large beers because of the ounce law in Arizona. Ha!

Before I talk a bit about our experience working for Spring Training concessions, I think I’ll write about our drive around the Superstition Mountains.

The first little town we came to featured a couple of prisons. I was too late on the shutter to get the picture I wanted of the Prison Swap Meet, or some such thing, but I nabbed a picture of the prison general store:

Prisons are big business around here.

Then it was on to the mountains. Aren’t they gorgeous?

We passed a little park on our way, and decided to stop and take some pictures of the cacti. You know my affinity for the prickly towers.

How's this for an artsy cactus shot?

Then it was on to find the Lost Dutchman mine and treasure galore. We didn’t find any lost gold, but we stopped by the Superstition Mountain Museum (but it was closed by the time we got there).

And we pulled into the Goldfield Ghostown and Mine Tour, but it was too crowded, so we didn’t stay long.

We did all this with the endgame being a big steak dinner at a local steak house. Phil had gotten directions for it via the internet, and we found it with no problem. Ok, one problem. It wasn’t open on Mondays. Oh well. Some other time.

Now, about this Aramark gig. I’m equating it with my experience at the sugar beet harvest. Seriously, I don’t know which I’d go back to before the other. The work isn’t hard, but it was like we were set up for failure. Phil was always going to be co-lead with someone who had done the job before, but then that guy didn’t show up, so Phil was under-trained. Then I was bumped from being a cashier to being the money lady, and though it’s nothing I can’t handle, it’s a load of work. And the main thing we have a problem with is that we’re responsible for inventory at the end of the day, but every Tom, Dick and Harry has access to our coolers and our backrooms. We have no idea what’s coming or going half the time, then we get chewed out when our numbers don’t mesh at the end of the day. And then we have workers who don’t speak or understand English, and that’s a whole other kettle of fish. All this for less than $100 a game! I’ll do a more complete writeup on this job like I did for our others at the end of the month so other Workampers can decide whether or not they would want to do this.

But there is good here too. We have some really great co-workers who work hard and can go with the flow. Without them, Phil and I would have packed up after the first game. They’re fellow Workampers, and in between the chaos, it’s been great talking with them about their experiences on the road. We’re even getting hooked up with connections in South Dakota from a couple who spent time there, so we’ll be in with the in-crowd from the start. And another couple has been to Custer State Park plenty of times, and even stay in the area in the summer, so we’ve learned a lot about the area from them too, and we’re even going to try to see them this summer. So there’s rays of light in the darkness that is Spring Training. And there’s only six games left, so don’t cry for us. Too much.

So we have a couple of games under our belts, and I'm going to be honest...it hasn't been all that fun. It's the usual coupling of poor communication and incomplete training. But we'll muddle through. I'll write a post just about our experiences at work, but it's my one day off before we get back to it for the next three days, so I'll save it for late this week.

Anyway, today was our return trip to Casa Grande Ruins for the behind-the-scenes tour. We're really glad we did it. It was an interesting tour, and not too many people get to see what we got to see. The NPS only offers these tours in March, and only on the weekends, one tour per day. So we feel pretty lucky.
I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Off limits (but not to us today!):

What they call Compound B:

Another shot of Compound B:

Closeup to one of the houses:

All along the walk, we got to see a bunch of pottery shards and pieces of obsidian. I was amazed because the tour guide told us it was ok to pick them up and look closely at them, as long as we put them back. I thought that was pretty generous.

Ground littered with pot shards:

Phil holding a particularly good example of the Hohokum pottery:

Stagecoach trail that led to Florence, Arizona in the early 1900s:

And during the walk, we were told about burrowing owls (I have to look them up online) and a couple of Great Horned Owls that live in the Big House. So when we were done with the hike, Phil and I went back to the Big House to try to see them. We saw one.

Shhhh, he's sleeping:

Phil and I finally visited the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument yesterday. We walked from our RV park as it was only about two miles or so, and the weather was, as usual, lovely and temperate. (Sorry, my family and friends in Pennsylvania who are getting buried in snow, snow and more snow.) We had to walk about another quarter-mile to get from the entrance gate to the Visitor’s Center, and we came across this cool tree along the way:

It reminded us of the worm guys in the break room in the movie Men in Black.

And I liked these cacti, so I took a picture of them. I’m a big cactus fan for some reason, even though I’ve ended up killing a few in my time. (Talk about not having a green thumb, eh?)

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument preserves an Ancient Sonoran Desert People farming community and "Great House." Created as the nation’s first archeological reserve in 1892, the site was declared a National Monument in 1918. (I took that passage from the NPS website.) If you want to read more about the history and culture of the monument, visit the NPS website at http://www.nps.gov/cagr/historyculture/index.htm.

After we paid the entrance fee and before we went outside to the ruins, we watched a short video and then got to browse a really nice, little museum they had in the Visitor Center. I’m recommend spending some time in there if you get the chance to visit, even though most of the folks skipped all the info and went right outside.

The main event is what they call the “Big House.”

Around the Big House are all the little walls and enclosures that they figured were other smaller houses. They have no idea what the Big House was used for, but Phil and I formulated some opinions. Phil thinks since there used to be a 7-foot wall around the entire compound, they were going to great lengths to protect something inside. We don’t think the Big House was anyone’s house. We think it was like a temple or some other religious site wherein something pretty important resided. But that’s just our guess. The park encourages you to come up with your own theories since no one’s ever going to know for sure.

Our entrance fee receipt is good for a week, and we’re really glad about that because next weekend they’re having a special tour where folks get to take a walk with a Ranger to places that are usually off limits to the public. We’ll be going outside the main compound area to a ball court, where it’s surmised the games were such that the losers would be offered up to the gods (ah, the good old days), and to another nearby compound. We can’t wait, and I’ll be sure to take plenty more pictures.