Snake...Snake!

Tracy and I had a great time at Usery Mountain Regional Park this weekend.  This was our first visit to this park, but the spaces were very nice and big and the views were absolutely beautiful as these pictures show.

One of the things that Tracy and I enjoy doing when camping (besides relaxing of course) is hiking and riding our bikes.  The park has several hiking and biking trails and one short trail within the campground has a guided tour with the names and information regarding the natural vegetation that grows along the path.  We enjoyed getting to know the names of these plants that we have seen for years.  Tracy gave me a quiz on several of our walks over the two days and it was obvious that her retention was much better than mine :-).

Following our educational walk, we decided to take a bike ride before it got too much hotter.  So we jumped on our mountain bikes and headed down the road.  About five spaces from ours, I looked down and saw a rattlesnake stretched out across the road sunning itself.  He appeared to me to be about two feet long and he did not make a move.  Tracy was riding beside me and I said "snake, snake..." and veered to my left to avoid running it over.  I'm not sure if I thought the snake would leap through the air and bite my throat or what, but this was the first time in our 18 years of living in Arizona that we saw a rattlesnake that wasn't behind glass.  Tracy swerved to the left and almost went off the road into a ditch, but we both survived the rattler who was probably trying to figure out what the heck we were doing trying to run each other off the road.  Luckily I don't think any other campers observed our encounter and hopefully no videos will mysteriously appear on YouTube!

We headed down to the Visitors Center to share our encounter with the Park Hosts, but they did not seem too impressed.  They asked us if it was dead or alive and if we relocated it off the road or not?  With that response, we certainly didn't share our close encounter with the ditch on the side of the road!

Even with our first rattlesnake encounter, we had a wonderful weekend hiking, biking, reading and napping in the Arizona sunshine.  Unfortunately our weekends away here are numbered as things are starting to heat up!

We have had a number of good people join us this week on our little adventure including Mike Mills, David Schumaker,  Alan McMillan, John and Ellen, and FD5, Retired. Welcome aboard to you all and thanks for joining us!


I hope you had a great weekend and were able to get out and enjoy it.  Have a safe and enjoyable week ahead!