Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone...I hope you had as wonderful a day as Donna and I did.

We had a late breakfast/lunch at Cracker Barrel (of course) since there's one about 3/4 mile away from the park we're in. Then we explored a bit.  We drove east toward Phoenix to the town of Goodyear and remarked at how clean and new everything looked.  There are new freeways being constructed with beautiful southwest motifs cast into the concrete overpasses and sound walls, and wonder of wonders, there are actually state workers picking up trash and debris all along the roads.  The place seems to be immaculate.  Of course, there is a lot of commercial development around Buckeye and Goodyear, so it is an attractive place to be.  One of the places we visited was Southwest Foods, who make one of my favorite hot sauces:

Complete with:

and:

A huge selection of hot sauces and nuts with spicy flavorings.  This pic is of the nut sampling table where we loaded up on tasty samples!  Unfortunately, I tasted the hottest nuts first, and couldn't taste a thing after that. Of course, we had to buy a couple of cans of nuts.....

Outside with the animals, there was a display of old farm equipment.  I remember riding on one of these mowing machines when I was a kid and my Dad had Alfalfa hay to mow and prepare for baling. The machine was pulled by a tractor and had a metal seat on the upright spring bar shown in the center between the wheels.  The various levers and controls were hand or foot operated, and the blade was operated by a series of gears driven by the wheels.  I can still remember the snik-snik-snik sound made by the blade as it moved back and forth at about a thousand miles an hour.  Check out the safety device:  None, except that the operator could jump off in a hurry.  No fenders or blade guards on this baby!  Pulling this with a tractor would be bad enough because there would be another person in the mix, but can you imagine operating this and controlling the team of horses or mules that was pulling it at the same time? That was the original concept.  Whew!

After our brief trip and a stop at Dunkin' Donuts, we came home to find several new neighbors.  We got to talking to the people in the adjacent space, who are from a little town outside Edmonton, AB, Canada.  Ended up spending most of the afternoon with them, some people from Alaska, and two other people from Jamestown, CA, a little town not to far from our home. Nice people.