We're home (finally)!

It was hard packing and leaving the mountains yesterday.  I nearly cried.  That doesn't happen to me when we are in the Sierra, so I'm not sure what it is about Arizona.  We both dearly love the Sierra and the Mogollon Rim in Arizona.  We may take a weekend in October and return to one of them, although I have the whole Thanksgiving week off in November....It was a 7 hour drive home and my scrub jay showed up to be fed right after we arrived.  The dogs were so happy to see us and Abby, my black cat, hasn't left my side lest we leave again!  She plopped herself right in the middle of my lap all afternoon.  I have tons of laundry to do today and I'm going to head up the hill and visit the horses.  You know, I DO have mountains just 10 minutes from my house!  I mean, how silly is that?  I drive from sea level to 1500 feet in literally 10 minutes and am up in the pinyon forest.  Further up the road, I'm in ponderosa trees.  So, while I miss the Sierra and the Mogollon Rim, I really do have my own smaller version right here in my back yard!  The animals are different, however.  I haven't seen hummingbirds like the ones in Arizona.  They were really brown (I never did get a photo of them).  And, there was a species of woodpecker unlike ours here in Southern California.  A beautiful, fluffy-tailed squirrel lived around the cabin, and some cute little long-billed birds visited the feeder up there.  I'm glad we spent 5 nights there and got to see and hear and smell the thunderstorms, but, alas, we both have to go to work Monday!  But, there's always next summer...Here are some photos from our Friday outing.  I wanted to find Black Canyon Lake because I'd read there were eagles there, so we headed out to the forest road.  We found the lake.  It didn't have eagles, but had an osprey nest.  My photos, Carson, were HORRIBLE of the osprey, so I'm not posting them.  I learned that you can't catch a moving target at 1/60 of a second...duh!  This area was burned in the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire.  That originally started as two separate fires.  One was started by a stranded motorist trying to get help.  The other one was arson.  They soon became one fire, the largest in Arizona's history until this summer's Wallow fire.  You can see the new growth in this area, but much of it is still pretty barren.