Arizona and back

We left our friends at the Colorado river and drove the wide open spaces to Scottsdale, AZ. That drive on Hwy 10 is not that easy with many, many trucks sharing the roadway and engaging in their form of "truck wars", slowly overtaking, with the process taking miles to accomplish!

 It is pretty amazing how straight the highway is, and on this day it was windy, making for interesting driving.
We were fortunate that the weather in Scottsdale was really nice, in the 80's mostly which allowed us to use the 18 hole putting course that surrounds the complex where or friends Claire and Jim live.

Our friend Jim is also a photographer, so he and I went off to a local butterfly exhibit while Claire and Diane went and worked on their art projects. The butterfly exhibit was a lot of fun and was also enjoyed by large groups of school children and the attendant noise level. They got really excited when a butterfly landed on their clothes.

I tried to get images of some butterfly's in flight but that is really difficult!
As we were about to leave we spotted this large moth, it is about 8 inches long and was pretty much hidden from view.

Part of our week was taken up with trying to rebook a Paris apartment. The first two we booked were canceled by the hosts after about a week in each case, both for emergencies in their respective families. Our third attempt was rejected by the host as not being available, even though their calendar indicated otherwise.
All of this was via Airbnb, who also updated their website in the middle of everything which then did not work as before on this computer at least. Needless to say this was a little frustrating with some terse messages being sent to them. After our third rejection, we did get a very helpful person to communicate with at Airbnb who indicated that if I used a Chrome browser the website would look like it used to! (which it did)
We did manage to book another apartment in Paris in a location we wanted, phew! With just a week to go, I was getting a little concerned!

To add to all of this, we got a call from our bank that told us my debit card was included in one of those scams that had occurred somewhere the card had been used. Of course I cannot get a new card before we leave the country!

Even Diane got in a little putting practice before we took the long drive back to San Jose. We stayed at the Best Western on Magic Mountain Parkway in Valencia which was probably the worst BW stay we have had, give it a miss if you are headed that way.
We will leave San Francisco on Tuesday for our first stop in London, and then on to Paris.
Stay tuned.