We were driving along and Elva was reading the map and saw "Casa Grande Ruins" so we decided to make a stop. Turning off Hwy 10 the desert suddenly becomes farm lands for miles and miles - cotton, alphalpha and rice, I think. Casa Grande is near Coolidge and Run by the national park service, the visitor center was great, lots of people there with their kids. Casa Grande is what Father Kino named the 4-story building when he first saw it in 1694. Excellent guided tour of that ruin built about 1,000 years ago, in a community of structures that were already over one thousand years old when it was built. The Casa Grande people were farmers and they built a very large system of canals from Gila River. The irrigation system was built thousands of years ago. There was probably a number of catastrophies that caused the people to abandon the large communities. One of which may have been the flooding and destruction of the irrigation system. Many of the eroded adobe walls reminded us of Paquime, in northern Mexico, which is an even older archeological site, a place where a thousand years ago the main economic activity was the raising of scarlet macaws, and selling their feathers far and wide.
We forgot to mention what we saw on the golf course in Yuma! About 25 of the strangest looking birds came and landed next to us. They were "Long-billed Curlews", whose beaks are so long and needle-shaped that it looks like they could not fly or even hold.their heads up. Basically they winter down here, near water, and Yuma has the river, and the golf course has plenty of ponds. Scores of coots also seem to call the golf course home. Next time we golf we'll try to remember the camera.
Checked in to motel in Tucson - ate lunch/dinner and went to get hair cuts. We feel like we look better now.
That's all for today.
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