Tuesday March 6: Today is the day-before-leaving day, so Rollie and I say good-bye to Jimi, our camp host friend at the Cochise Stronghold campground.

We play music outside today – finally warm enough to do that. Pack up as much of the inside stuff as I can. Clifford saves his packing up for the morning, as he will be using the radios and antennas until late. We have an easy dinner of soup and sandwiches so that I have a minimum of cleanup tonight.

Wednesday March 7: We finish packing up and are on our way by 10:45 a.m, with Rollie right behind us. We take Cochise Stronghold Road to Dragoon Road for the first time, which saves several miles, and then east on I-10. We stop at Pilot on the edge of Tucson for gas, then head north across Tucson to the Santa Catalina Mountains and our destination: Molino Basin Campground.

The road up the mountain is a bit steep, but we take it easy, with Rollie following close behind us. Totally different landscape and vegetation than Cochise Stronghold; saguaros dominate the hillsides as we ascend.

We arrive at Molino Basin Campground in early afternoon and drive through looking for two campsites close to each other, but it is obvious this campground is catering more to tent campers than RV campers. We find a loop with a site big enough for both rigs, two picnic tables, bear boxes, a great gnarly oak tree, shrubs for privacy … hooray!

After getting set up, Rollie and I do music outside. The neighbor across the road comes over with her guitar and wow, can she sing! Another camper joins us with his penny whistle. It is so fun to have more musicians – a real jam session.

Later, I make nachos for dinner, but skip doing dishes, journal, and planner. Rare for me to skip these, but I’m beat from the whole move and set-up routine. But it was a good day with finding this nice big site to share and jamming with the neighbors.

Thursday March 8: Today is a town day with stops at Barnes & Nobles, Bookmans, Verizon to get Clifford’s phone set up as a hotspot, Trader Joe, and Natural Grocer. It is nice to be living out of town but with access to our favorite shops. Send texts and pics to a couple of my kids, Happy Birthday to my sister Nancy and a friend while we are still in Tucson, as we have no cell service or internet on the mountain.

Friday March 9: There is an issue with the Verizon hotspot not working even when we go to a pull-out where there is good cell service. Clifford wants to get it resolved today, so we head back to Verizon. Turns out Clifford has to buy a hotspot-compatible phone. We run a couple of errands, including buying a new phone at Target and returning to Verizon to get it activated. Before we know it, we have used up a big chunk of the day.

Back at camp, Rollie and I go for a walk through the off-road campsites on the other side of the creek, a secluded area where tenting is the only option.

It is too windy to do music outside, so I edit for Ang for awhile and play viola before making dinner for us to share with Rollie.