We are in the desert. Desert as in sand and cacti and beautiful sunsets. Caleb's words as we drove into Yuma were "wow this is a different kind of beautiful." It's beautiful but so different than what we've called beautiful in Colorado. And it felt like the beach to us! Seeing landscaped palm trees first made it feel like the beach to me. Granted the closest beach is still 2.5 hours away. It was warm and breezy so long sleeves still felt nice with the breeze. The breeze was a little sandy/salty from the desert terrain and during our walk I ended up with exactly what I would call "beach hair."
We were both pleasantly surprised to see mountains as we drove closer to Yuma. We were expecting the range of the White Mountains in Arizona before we reached Phoenix, but as we made our way closer to Yuma we were still seeing mountains. This picture was taken during our walk when we first got to town. The sun was setting giving the mountains a pretty hue of color.
I don't know what these mountains are called or if mountain is even the correct term, but I have been calling them the desert mountains. They are mostly rock and sand and the peaks aren't too high. Yuma's elevation is 141 feet. We both said "that's practically sea level!"
We hiked to one of the desert mountain peaks and the elevation was 1,554 feet at the peak. When you consider we've been living and looking at mountains that rise from 6,000 feet up to 14,000 feet, you can understand why I say these desert mountain peaks aren't too high. 1000 foot peaks don't appear quite as grand as 8,000 foot peaks. But these desert mountains are still so beautiful to have as our view around Yuma. It wasn't the completely flat desert landscape we were expecting and we were okay with that expectation not being met.
We found a 4 mile hike which we could tell by looking at that we would have a pretty view. Our views overlooked Yuma and back east over the agriculture. We've read that 90% of the leafy vegetables America consumes from November-March is grown in Yuma. There are fields of varying shades of green surrounding Yuma, and where you don't see fields of agrictulture you see the desert terrain of sand and cactus. The picture below is looking east over some agriculture fields of Yuma.
The next picture below was our view looking west over Yuma and the surrounding areas outside of town. Yuma is only 20 minutes from the Mexico border. A popular safe tourist area in Mexico is Los Algodones with shops, restaurants, and medical offices. We have our passport cards so we can either walk over into this town or we can drive over. I'll write a blog post about us getting some real authentic Mexican food when we venture over there!
We are also only 2.5 hours from San Diego so I'm ready to plan a trip to the beach once Caleb has his work schedule for the next few weeks. We are looking forward to heading to the Phoenix area for a couple days soon to see some family we have there. We are enjoying this first travel nurse assignment and are both thinking we are going to enjoy the experience of travel nursing. It's been fun to learn about a new area and explore and are excited knowing we can continue to do this in many new to us places.
My next post I'll share about one of the local festivities we attended this past weekend. It was a Wild West type of festivity. AND next week, I'll get to share more about our housing we are going to live in through the beginning of April. We are currently in a vacation rental for our first couple weeks in town, but next week we move into a 5th wheel motor home we are renting! More to come on that... so stay tuned.
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