Ajo pronounced, Ah Ho

Roses are red, violets are blue, clicking pics on my blog gives you a new view.

My favorite boondocking spot at the old Ajo rodeo arena. It's off to itself and well away from the area that gets the most boondocker's. I'm only about 3 miles from town and yet I'm out in the peace and quiet of the desert and away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Ajo. A perfect place for me to hunker down until the holidays blow over.

[Okay I'm kidding, it's been many decades since Ajo has seen a hustle or a bustle.]

It was an easy and uneventful 90-mile drive from Dateland to Ajo this morning, where I plan on hunkering down for at least the Christmas holiday and maybe even New Year's.

If I'd been smart, I would've done some grocery shopping in Yuma, but I was too lazy, so now I need to buy my Christmas dinner from the local grocery store here in Ajo. The local grocery store is tiny by today's standards but was perfectly normal in the 1960s. The first thing I notice is how narrow the aisles are, barely room for two carts to pass each other, and with concerns about the Bat flu, the aisles seem even more narrow than they are.

The next thing you notice is the limited choices they have; you don't get 158 choices of cereal like the big box stores. And the prices are high, to say the least. Especially if you're used to shopping at Walmart, but if you usually shop at some all-organic grocery store, prices here will seem perfectly normal. My solution to grocery price sticker shock is not to pay any attention to the prices at all, buy only what I need, and get out as quickly as possible.

I look forward to the Air Force and Marine fighter aircraft flying over the campground, making their final approach to the bombing range because it gives me some picture taking opportunities. But getting a decent picture of the high-flying, high-speed airplanes is difficult at best and requires a lot of flyovers before I get an image that I'm willing to put on my blog. My concern right now is with the holidays coming up, they might not be doing much training, and I won't be given many chances to get a picture. But I just got here, and only time will tell.

                                                      theboondork

It's hard to describe a 1/2 mile long freight train when it comes roaring by at 60 miles an hour and you're standing 30 feet from it. The sound is deafening, the ground shakes, and you can feel it in your bones, you start feeling dizzy from the sight of the train cars going by that fast, and I actually had to turn away. I've been around slow moving trains before but having them thunder by this fast is a memorable experience.

The Long freight trains I normally see have  locomotives at the front and locomotives at the back, but every train I've seen here has locomotives in the front and in the middle,  none in  back. I'm not sure why.

The rear end of a train just doesn't look right without a caboose on it. I understand there's no reason now to have one there, but the train just looks..... Unfinished,

This guy was camping in a tent a couple of sites down for me and he's traveling on an electric bicycle. He told me [from 10 feet away] he's been  riding across country for something to do with "Wounded Warriors"  him being a wounded veteran himself from Desert Storm. He's already ridden to the East Coast and now is on his way back to San Diego California. He must be a tough guy because he was sleeping on concrete with a half-inch Walmart blue foam pad under him. And other than sleeping on broken glass, I don't know how you get any tougher than that.