Arizona Missed the Great January Freeze, and We Were in Scottsdale!

Independence, Kansas, recorded 1F degree. And a couple from Minnesota said it was -25F degrees up there. In Dallas the streets were frozen. This was mid-January 2026. But in Scottsdale, Arizona, the temperature nearly every day of January reached 75 F degrees. We missed the Great Freeze, and were very thankful.

The country was the greenest I’ve ever seen it in January. This was due to heavy rains about two weeks before we arrived.

The following lists some of the things, old and new, that we did while in Scottsdale. I should have added farmers markets, because we visited three of them. One was in Scottsdale, but the best one was in Fountain Hills.

The famous Church of the Red Rocks in Sedona I hadn’t seen for 30 years. The inside now contains a statue of Jesus at the altar, and if you stand beneath the statue, his eyes look down on you. For me the visit was a beautiful spiritual experience. The views were spectacular – one showed Cathedral Rock in the distance, and an enormous man-made building we couldn’t identify in the foreground.

The next pic is a Waymo taxi, which is driverless, and there are lots of them in Phoenix, a test city. I wanted to surprise the family, and arranged for a Waymo to pick us up and take us to See’s Candies in oldtown Scottsdale. It was a weird feeling to watch the steering wheel turn by itself, and feel the car accelerate, then change lanes, then pull up at the next stoplight, without a person driving it.

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I explained to the family that the knob at the top of the car was the eyes that rotated 360 degrees very rapidly, and recorded a movie every tenth of a second. The movie is sent to a computer, which is like a brain that looks at all the cars, stoplights, curbs, and roads, and tells the steering wheel, the accelerator, and the brake pedal what to do. It’s called artificial intelligence, or AI.

Kim arranged a delightful breakfast treat at the English Rose Tea Room at an outer suburb of Phoenix called Carefree. Kim and Lisa are with their mom. The food was awesome, especially the scones and jam and cream that I was raised on in Australia. Carefree has lots of large new million-dollar homes. The house of windows in the picture is built on boulders and exhibits a life-sized metal stagecoach, probably built in Mexico, in the front yard. In the center of the business district is a cactus garden with a variety of exotic plants.

One of our hobbies is rock-hounding at Saddle Mountain, about 50 miles west of Phoenix. Mary Ann was able to walk around with help, and pick up fire-agates that she found with a long pincer tool. We washed them and stored them in mason jars filled with water. In the sunshine, the red streaks in the fire-agates shine like Christmas lights inside the jars. Kim has become an expert at selecting fire-agates — she walks around for miles scanning the ground for the best stones. Photos of our previous fire-agates can be seen here.

Finally, two more spectacular pics of Cathedral Rock in Sedona.
Best wishes for February from the Gray Nomad — now back in Albuquerque.

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Romans 8:28 in the Amplified Bible (AMP) states:
“And we know [with great confidence] that God [who is deeply concerned about us] causes all things to work together [as a plan] for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to His plan and purpose”. It emphasizes God’s active, loving orchestration of all life’s circumstances for the ultimate good of believers.
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