three of a kind...: arizona meets the maurers...

after traveling through five states on four flights in one day, the maurers finally arrived in arizona. (hey, flying standby ain't always easy!) arizona was ready for them though and greeted them all with sunny skies and good times ahead. they had no definite plans except to spend as much time outdoors as possible, so that is exactly what we did.

on the first full day of their visit we enjoyed a picnic lunch at papago park and then spent the afternoon walking through the zoo. it was there that i partook in the discovery of a geocache, my very first, and was eager to find more! after a full day in the sun we headed home to relax and eat a typical southwestern meal, tacos of course.

day two started out with a splash as gavin fell into the pool while trying to retrieve the oranges that matt picked out of the tree. thankfully we were able to laugh at his clumsiness as he was only wet, chilled, and luckily unhurt. then it was off to tailgating at the spring training field for a Milwaukee Brewers game. GO BREW CREW! although they lost the game we had a great time anyway, stopped at Cabela's on the way home, and then dinner at phoenix's very own Culver's.

days three and four were filled with hiking and geocaching. we picnicked both days (much to quinn's delight), hiked to the top of the papago buttes, took in the views at red mountain, and even happened upon a rattlesnake. matt got the hang of the GPS and was quite the leader in finding several geocaches. in the afternoon the kiddos wanted to do nothing but swim so naturally we let them. crazy as it sounded to me and as blue as their lips were, you couldn't help but admit that they had a blast. and even after two full days of hiking we still took a nice walk on sunday evening near our home and discovered that there were many geocaches in our very neighborhood. i think we may have found a new past time...

the final day of their stay was split between two activities: the boys hiked, played frisbee golf, and geocached while the girls had a shopping day. i'd have to say it was a successful day for both parties. once matt got done with work we headed to our favorite brewery Four Peaks to ~~wine~~ beer and dine. yum yum!

unfortunately flights looked pitifully poor for my standby visitors so they decided to cut their vacation short by a day to make it home. luckily they only had two flights on their way home, unluckily there were about eight hours of waiting in between those flights. eeeekk!