Almost to the end of 2025 blogging! It has been quite a fun year to recap a little at a time.
On to December, which started with a hike up to Thimble Peak with Gavin. This time we brought a length of rope and climbing gear so John could (quite literally) haul me up to the top. Yay for a summit celebration!
Gavin taking his own selfie:
John admiring the view of Tucson, Blackett's Ridge, and Sabino Canyon:
It was a short, easy rappel down the hard part of the Thimble, just above where Gavin is waving:
John descends via the short rope already in place:
That was fun, thank you for the help and the company, John and Gavin! One more peak I can look up at and remember being there.
Fun stickers at Midtown Deli - love the duck and "Livin La Vida Quokka"
Don't be a prick:
One last visit to the Musical Instruments Museum and then I'll (probably) stop mentioning it! This time we gave ourselves the entire day to finish it and we finally made it to the end.
Accordions (and bagpipes next door), how did someone come up with these ideas as ways to make music?
Speaking of accordions, John and I separately kept returning to the same musical clip to listen to again. Later I bought the song, so now I have another language (I believe an Austrian German dialect) on my mp3.
In case you're interested in something different, here's the band singing in a YouTube video:
Moving on to dulcimers, gotta love the "Canjo" of ham!
Thinking of our niece Abby who plays a mandolin:
Louis Cato sighting!
Summary of MIM: Highly recommend. Give yourself as much time as you can.
An elf that is most definitely not on a shelf:
One more FKT to report! There's a new 50-mile route on our side of town so of course I had to try it. It's called the Robles to Wasson Shuffle:
John dropped me off at the start:
The route zigzags around most of the Robles trails, which is my backyard so I just had to get the turns right. Then over to the Tucson Mountain Park where I'm also pretty familiar with the trails. Fun little stone path through the saguaros:
The Bowen Stone House, where a group of people were gathered, perhaps on a hiking tour:
John met me for a mid-run resupply at the next trailhead (great to see you, hubby!) then I did some road running to reach Sweetwater Preserve. I enjoyed revisiting that set of trails, some of them nice and runnable. This photo is from my water drop at the trailhead the day before:
One of the smooth desert trails that I like to meander along:
As I noted in my writeup on the FKT site, Camino del Cerro isn't the greatest road for running, but it's generally pretty quiet. And easy to hear cars approaching, and easy to get off the road to wait for them to pass. A woman who had stopped at her mailbox came over to see if I was OK? Oh, I'm good, thanks for asking! I guess she doesn't see runners on that road every day.
City lights during the climb toward Wasson Peak, with a glow from my headlamp (I had just turned it off for the photo):
It was interesting knowing the Sweetwater trail reasonably well but not having a good sense of how far it was to the saddle without being able to see it up ahead. I was still moving at a good clip, found the saddle, and climbed strong to the top of the peak.
The trail down the backside is wonderful! At least until the next saddle, then it's rocky and slow, but then you get to the bottom and the route is complete.
Thank you John for the run support and picking me up at the end! That was a super fun day and excellent distance training.
John happened to be installing solar at the Tucson Village Farm one morning when I was running and shopping at Trader Joe's nearby. I bopped over with a delivery of Brookies for the crew and grabbed a photo (from a distance) on the way back:
Rainbow! We had a Christmas Eve rainstorm that cleared up in time for our walk for sushi supper:
There are some elaborate holiday-decorated golf carts at our park (they even did an evening parade so we could sit on the back of Tug-E and admire the creative creations like this one):
Another trip to the top of Wasson, during a Tucson Trail Runners run, so I could get a picture in the daylight:
Also a photo of the logbook that I had signed during the recent FKT run:
Running in a part of town that I don't normally explore, I found this sculpture near Udall Park:
I believe this is a Joe Pagac creation - Javier Javelina (reminds me of at least one of his murals):
In addition to the elf hat, there are several Trek-related items to admire on this car:
Merry Christmas from a local saguaro family!
And that's a wrap for last year - thank you for following along!
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