We are settled into our RV spot in the Rio Verde RV Park in Cottonwood, AZ. We originally had planned to spend six weeks here before we head back to Idaho (arriving there in mid-May). However, the park is getting run down with lots of very old and poorly maintained RVs. We have liked the park because it is “quirky” but now it has reached the seedier side of quirky so we may cut our stay short and try a few other RV parks (but still planning to return to Idaho in mid-May).

One of the quirky aspects we like is the Mexican taco truck – the Sonora Taqueria - which parks here over the weekends. So last Saturday we decided to pick up some take out.

Check out the menu – yes you can purchase cow intestine tacos, brain tacos, and tongue tacos along with the boring beef and pork tacos. We purchased some green chili and a beef quesadilla and took them back to the privacy of our trailer.

On Sunday we took a short hike up the hill behind our trailer.

If you remember from last year the hill top is a collapsed Sinagua (500 to 1425 AD) pueblo consisting of around 75 rooms and plazas, etc. Looking up at the hill from the trailer we can see the top above the highest band of vegetation is covered with white rocks. Those rocks are the collapsed walls of the pueblo.

In the picture above, about half way up the hill is a band of dense vegetation which is a terrace. On this terrace directly above our trailer is a small 12 to 15 room annex to the pueblo.

Looking down from that terrace we can see our trailer and to the right all the collapsed wall rocks scattered about (and the whole thing is covered with thousands of pottery fragments).

On Monday we took a short hike along the river. The trail starts at the old jail (now a tea room) in Old Town Cottonwood and ends up at Dead Horse Ranch State Park.

As usual, Abby has to play in the water.

And someone decided to protect this little flower.

A storm front came into the area on the weekend and has really cooled things off. With it has been some very gusty winds which seem to be the culprit in crashing the RV park’s wifi. After a couple of days without wifi we proceeded to do something that we have talked about all winter (because most parks we have stayed in have had very limited/week or even non-existent wifi). We started using our smart phones as mobile hot spots, and this blog post is our first real experiment (other than dealing with some email, etc.). It is so much faster than any wifi we have had and the signal is supper strong (because the phone is just a few inches away). Our phone’s family plan allows us to use up to 10 gigs of data each month without additional cost, but we have no idea how connecting the laptop to the web through the phone will consume data. But we can monitor that so this is an interesting experiment.

The wet and windy weather front is supposed to be out of here by tomorrow so we will probably get out and have some more interesting comments and pictures to share with you – so check back soon!

ADDENDUM:  After logging out of this site and turning off our mobile hot spot on our phone, we checked our data usage. We used 52 mb of data over 15 minutes uploading text and 8 images. That equals 5% of our 10 gig monthly allowance. That sounds like a lot but that includes 25 mb of images off our phones. Plus we opened the updated blog to make sure we didn't screw something up. The obvious answer is to downsize the images before uploading to the blog - that could save a lot. OOOOPS!  Bad math. The 52 mb of data for this post is not 5% of 10 gigs but is 5% of 1 gig. Therefore, we used 0.5% of our 10 gig monthly allotment which isn't bad at all.