Monday, October 4, 2010
Desert Gardens RV Park, Florence, AZ - May 1-5
This park should be noted by all RVers who might be in this area. It has very large sites and is located on 142 acres of Sonoran desert, with hiking trails through the majestic Saguaros. It is very friendly & inexpensive. There are many interesting attractions nearby. The only drawback was the number of security lights.
As soon as we got here, we started worrying about Gracie. We made an appt with the local vet and in the meantime tried feeding her a can of "people" tuna (she had previously showed no interest in the various flavors of cat food). She loved the tuna, so we continued to feed it to her the rest of the day, worrying all along that she would never "settle" for plain dry cat food again. To our surprise, the next day she ate a lot more of her cat food. Since we continue to suspect that the main problem has to do with hairballs & stress, we also feed her hairball "goop" whenever she is interested. So by the time of our vet appt, she seemed much better. He checked her over thoroughly and spent a lot of time looking at the results of her previous blood work. Again, he couldn't diagnose anything, but he made several suggestions to keep her eating. He also suggested courses of action in case she stopped eating again. So far, that has not been a problem, and we are happy to report that Gracie now seems pretty much back to "normal". Her weight is down, so she gets to eat whenever she wants to, and that pleases her. Otherwise, her personality seems as adorable as always, and we hope her distress was just a temporary thing.
While we were here we walked a self-guided tour of historic downtown Florence, the 4th oldest town in AZ; visited Casa Grande Ruins NM, which preserves the remains of an ancient Hohokam farming village as well as the Great House (Casa Grande); and went to Boyce Thompson Arboretum SP. The last was the highlight as, in addition to the lovely natural areas, they also had a display of 67 African sculptures from Chapungu Sculpture Park of Zimbabwe along nearly two miles of paths throughout the park. The pieces were up to 10 ft tall & weighed as much as 6000 pounds. How they even got them here is a miracle. While there, we were treated to the sight of several new birds: Bullock's Oriole, Abert's Towhee, Hermit Warbler & Townsend's Warbler.# posted by Doug and Willie @ 9:49 PM 
