Rowkin Rovings Blog

Sorry but have been a little recalcitrant with our postings but have been very busy being busy.

Happy New Year to Everyone.

We did manage to secure another rental for January at Venture Out courtesy of the grape vine of people who meet at the dog park each day. Word of mouth is an amazing thing in the park – you only have to ask.

We had a very quiet Christmas celebrating with new friends Ingrid and Gene who are from small town Saskatchewan and Ingrid is the sister of our good friends Leslie and Dwight in Calgary. We did out usual pavlova as our contribution for the day.

We also had a get together with our other news friends Gabby and Linda on Boxing Day with yet another pavlova and in return they gave us some vegemite. You might think, well that is like taking coals to Newcastle but we were very appreciative as we have not been able to find any vegemite in Calgary for a while and had run out.

We moved into our new abode on the 31^st January and have settled in very quickly. It is on the opposite side of the park which isn’t a problem except we are a lot further away from the pickleball courts. The plus is that it is right near the dog park.

This rather cute garden ornament is made out of recycled pickleballs by one of the park residents. What we have found is that there is a lot of talent in the park which really should not surprise us as everyone in this park has a life time of stories and skills to share.

Fras managed to continue with his rowing up until the 20^th December but since then the season has gone into hibernation until mid January.

There has still been lots to amuse him though. Crochet and lawn bowls have taken up a considerable amount of time along with getting into pickle ball. Here in North America, pickleball is huge!!! In the park we have 12 courts which are constantly booked up. Of the roughly 3500 people that live here, 1000 of them are registered as pickleball players. The pickleball association in the park are desperately trying to build more courts…..but…..the area they would like to build them on is where the tennis courts are……………..lots of argy bargy going on there. To say it has become a political hot potato is an understatement.

Fras has continued to go on weekly hikes which he enjoys but the terrain is somewhat very much the same. When you are used to hiking in the Canadian Rockies, the Arizona landscape doesn’t quite come up to par.

We do find that we really need to make the effort to get out and investigate what is outside the park as apart from groceries, clothes etc there is not need to go outside it’s perimeter.

One of our excursions has been to catch the local tram into the city of Phoenix (sneaking Toque on) which took us just over an hour.

As it was the week between Christmas and New Year, the city really was very dead. We struggled to find anything that was open except the ubiquitous Starbucks.

The old Court House.

One of the very few green parks in the city and we can imagine that this would be very popular as a lunch spot for office workers. Guess the impression that we came away with is that Phoenix is a modern, low rise city center that felt a bit soulless to us.

We went into the city this last weekend with Gabby and Linda to see the Phoenix Symphony orchestra play some Tchaikovsky.

Following what was a lovely cultural afternoon, we went to a very yummy Italian restaurant.

Our time in the park will finish on the 31^st January. We will travel back to Calgary in a relatively straight line north. Until then, we will continue to be busy with all our activities at our “summer camp”. Having said that though, it has certainly cooled off and at night has dropped as low a zero degrees. The daytimes remain sunny and gets to highs of around 15-18 degrees which still make it palatable. We have been having what they term here as hard frosts which aren’t hoar frosts but enough to make its presences felt.

The pool is now heated to 34c which is great but it is too hot to do laps and to get out and get home is one of the most difficult things to do.

One of our other tasks is to get some new winter tyres for Gertie prior to our drive back to Canada. We were very doubtful if we were going to achieve this considering we are in Arizona and it doesn’t snow in this area but, courtesy of Costco, we have sourced the exact tyres we want and they are the same price that we would pay back in Calgary. We will have them fitted the week prior to our return trip. The other big event is that Gertie clocked over 200,000k – pretty impressive.

We won’t do any other blogs until we start the trip back up north as until then there will not be much to write about.

Something we have done is to secure the months of December, January, February 2024/2025 in the park. Our friends Gabby and Linda have a unit they rent so we have had a viewing and have put a deposit down. It is a lovely unit with all the facilities we need and is back in the same area closer to the pickleball courts. So, we guess that we can now formally be called Snowbirds!!!!