On the road again ;-)

“On the road again”
I’m working on my nickname again – gypsyjudge.
My mother, Nita Melvin, would have been 100 years old in July of this year. She was a complex, loving person, and full of curiosity. She loved to travel but stayed where she “belonged” — at home with family. She had a world map as a mural on their bedroom wall and used different colored straight pens to mark where various family and friends traveled. Whenever someone was leaving, she would say, “Take my good-looking eyes with you, and come back to tell me all about it.”
So in her honor, I hope to show you some of my travels, through her “good-looking eyes.”
This week I flew from Florida to Tucson to help a friend who is to have eye surgery and won’t be able to drive for a while. The weather here is slightly different than that in Florida – I exchanged soggy and cold for a humidity (8 to 9%) that was a real shocker to my sinuses. The temps in Tucson are in the high 80’s during the day & low 40’s at night.
We visited the Saguaro National Park – the Saguaro are the cacti of cowboy movies. They grow very, very slowly – they don’t begin to grow arms their first 75 to 100 years; they can grow 80 feet tall and live 150 years.
Yesterday we took the car down to Patagonia, AZ. a small town about 60 miles south of Tucson and 20 miles north of the Mexican border. We had burritos for breakfast – of course – with salsa that would take the hair off your tongue. We decided to take “the road less traveled” back to Tucson but chickened out when the pavement ended and the dirt road began to fork, repeatedly. We found a Border Patrol – not hard to do – and he reassured us that the roads were going to ultimately return us to civilization. So we rode 40+ miles on rough, dirt roads – through patches of small oak trees, over dry gullies, and up to Canelo Pass, a high grassland in cowboy country where the cattle have the right-of-way. We made it back to pavement just before the sun went down; then it was only an hour back to Tucson.
Part of this trip will include an excursion to Santa Fe.  We’ll probably find some more back roads along the way.  Tuesday, Dec 2, I will work with the Solace Crises Center, a child advocacy center, as they roll-out their big fund raiser, BuY the Book; I’ll donate 25% of the sales of my book, Public Secrets and Justice, to Solace. On Wednesday, I do a training session with a group of about 30 professionals from a variety of agencies who work with child abuse.
You can reasonably expect some “operator errors” as I begin, again, to learn the technology required for this blog site.  I had a hard time before with pictures – bear with me as I work through it again.