adventure trip. case grande national monument.

adventure trip: a sort of planned day outing with family.  which means we have snacks, water, plenty of gas in the car and a general direction of what we are doing but not the time it will take to do it.


I make up things all the time, call things weird names. I do--if I have a tense muscle in my back--which it seems I have all the time, I call it a herman.  I have no idea...really i don't I just call it that....Okay so back to the adventure trip.  A couple of weeks ago we talked about going to a National Monument to help my youngest earn one of his Merit Badges for Scouts.  We talked about several places then I remembered Casa Grande National Monument:

These ruins are about 45 minutes from my house.  You can tell by the people that it's a fairly large structure--4 stories to be exact.  I think the thing that most surprised is that in that it had several compounds--they believed 2,000 people lived in the area--CRAZY!
 hands on experience:

 here are some closeups:

 

it looks smooth from far away but this is what it looks like on the outside walls:

Even though there are stairs inside the ruins--it has been blocked off for years due to vandalism from passing travelers.  

 according to the signage above the current roof was placed there in 1932.  No noticeable changes have happened since the original repairs in 1891--pretty impressive.

 

  what they thought it might look like:

 these water original water bowl was found in tact as they were excavating the site--it's quite large...

my youngest and I in a family selfie in a reflective mirrored door:

 ball court, my hubby really wanted to see this, it's by the parking lot away from the main building, it was thought that they played a ball game in it:

 Me and hubby with a photobombed behind the sign:

it cost us $15 to go, TOTALLY worth it!  You can spend as little or as long as you want, they have an interesting movie and an hour long tour with a tour guide to explore the area.  We opted for the self guided tour, afterward we treated ourselves with large/tall ice cream cones from McDonalds (the ONLY thing that I will eat there!)  I loved our adventure trip and look forward to looking at more ruins in AZ:
we have visited several but want to visit as many as we can!
I have a couple of layouts planned for the pictures I took and the rest will go into my project life.
Thanks for the educational visit today, thought I would share something different!