My AZ weekend!

I'm back from Arizona for the second time in two weeks. I love Arizona, but I'm glad to be back home for now. Plus we're going to Washington this weekend and camping next weekend, so I'm not REALLY at home. Friday night we went to Los Dos, which is my FAVORITE Mexican restaurant. They have fabulous margaritas and delicious food. It's incredibly spicy but that's good because I'm trying to like spicy food more anyway, and it is very flavorful. With a margarita and some sour cream, I can take the heat! Yummy. There was some discussion about driving to Vegas that night, spending a few hours there, and driving back before my flight the next day, but that was eventually vetoed (giving my parents-in-law more fodder for their fight about me being "prematurely old" - lack of spontaneity in this one!). Saturday morning we went to breakfast at "The Farm", which is where Hart and Becky got married. Delish! Then we went to Hart and Becky's new house for a while. Somehow it came up that they couldn't find their GPS that they got for their wedding, so Hart started looking around for it. Then someone else mentioned geocaching, so we decided to go! We went to a park in Gilbert to look for the cache - 4 of us spent probably 45 minutes searching for it and never did find it. What a bummer. Still, it was grand fun. We hung out for a while longer and then it was time to take me to the airport! A great visit. :)

Sunday morning we met Gary at church. We were supposed to meet Julie too, but she hadn't slept well that night so she stayed in bed - what a slacker (yes, she does read my blog, and yes, she will scold me later for calling her a slacker on the internet. She will also laugh.) We went to the same church we went to last week (that Geoff and I have gone to for a while before the Great Church Search of 2008). The pastor at this church is excellent! One of the funny things he does in his sermons is mention "oh he's so spiritual" in a sarcastic way. For example last week he was talking about how he saw a stack of papers on the side of the road... he didn't pick them up because he's from California, not Oregon! Then he said "oh, Bob would have definitely picked them up, and then recycled them - Bob's so spiritual". Then yesterday he asked us to flip to a certain place in our Bibles... he saw someone get there really quickly and said "look at Fred, already there - Fred's so spiritual!". It's very funny. (NOT that that's what makes him an excellent pastor, just an amusing antedote to share). After that we went to Julie and Gary's for a delicious fajita lunch (see, earning points back by calling the lunch delicious - but honestly, it was). Then we talked about my Arizona trip, and geocaching came up. Everyone thought it sounded like tons of fun... and then Geoff and I recalled that we hadn't used our REI dividend yet for the year, plus I had an American Express gift card that I got from work, so we took those things, went to REI, and bought ourselves a GPS! It's nothing fancy, but it does the job we need for geocaching! So we took Julie and Gary and went to the parking structure of a local mall to try to find a cache hidden there. The 4 of us looked for about an hour and couldn't find it! We did get stopped by mall security though - that was fun, trying to explain we were looking for treasure in the parking garage... hehe. Luckily he was super nice and let us continue our search. No one was thrown into "mall jail". We also got a lot of suspicious looks from shoppers heading back to their cars. Certainly not a place you'd want to take kids geocaching - way too much traffic! This one was rated a 3.5 out of 5 on the difficulty scale. I think we thought too much of ourselves, we're going to have to try an easier one. Geoff and I swung by another cache location near our house on the way home (this one included a few pictures on the website - both of what the actual caches was, and of where it was hidden in the sign of the park). We walked straight to the sign, I felt up around the letter E, and there it was! It was a teeny tiny capsule about half the size of your ring finger that had a teeny tiny scroll that we signed our names to. It was so fun to find our first cache! We're going to try another one today after work on our way to softball practice. We're addicted. ;-) Definitely recommend it if you have or can borrow a GPS!