Have you heard the Crackle of the Grackle?

So there we sat for a couple of nights at the SKP RoVers' Roost Park in Casa Grande. Compared to our Benson Co-op, this is a small park, about half as many sites, and each site about half as large as ours. But they are a closely knit group. They even sell Tee-Shirts with their logo on them! We bought a couple for ourselves.

As we sat out for our own Happy Hour-and-a-half under the tall pine tree behind our site, we looked at the Organ Pipe cactus and listened to the grackles.

Now, grackles are not our favorite bird; they are noisy, very noisy. But their noise is a wonder in itself. Grackles have a variety of calls and songs, and sometimes they sound like electronic instruments sending out alarms. There is no way I can describe these birds besides: noisy, raucous, absonant, acute, atonal, blaring, blatant, braying, brusque, cacophonous, discordant, dissonant, dry, ear-piercing, grating, grinding, gruff, harsh, hoarse, husky, inharmonious, jarring, loud, piercing, rasping, sharp, squawking, stertorous, strident, thick, unharmonious, unmusical. (I got those words from an on-line thesaurus, and they all apply. And if you click on any of the underlined words, you'll go right to a thesaurus to learn more words!) If you don't know Grackles -- this is the "Great-tailed Grackle."

But it was enjoyable listening to them! Nature has her own songs, and we have our own ears. So, to paraphrase the Bible, "Those who have ears, let them hear!"

But how did we get here? Well, when we started planning this part of the trip, we considered where to make our first stop. Picacho Peak? Picacho RV Park? Casa Grande's Western Horizons park? The Moose Club RV park in Arizona City? There were reasons for and against all of them, and we had been to all of them before. Then we remembered the SKP Co-op in Casa Grande, and that we had never visited this park. And for $15 a night, that's pretty good!

We drove across southern Arizona in 99 degree heat, using our dash A/C, but not the "house" A/C. When we arrived, we found that the chococlate Easter Bunny I had bought for Suzy had met his end, an ignominious end, in the heat of the drive. Poor "Professor!" He didn't deserve to die in this terrible fashion!

Professor's belly melted and collapsed! His thorax separated from his lungs and his cranial attachments! He sank into sad submission, and he succumbed.

Poor Professor! However, we are sure he will be as just tasty Easter Sunday! Poor Professor, but lucky us! He was to be Suzy's first-ever chocolate Easter Bunny in the 68 years of her life. And he still will be, in spite of his untimely demise.

And now we are in the North Ranch SKP Park in Congress, Arizona. How we got here and what we found, in the next edition of ... Our Life on Wheels!