Salt River Wild Horses
We love Arizona… (check out this blog post), and without a doubt, at the top of our “cool things in AZ” list is seeing the wild horses along the Salt River.
The Salt River area located in Tonto National Forest is approximately 30 min east and north of Phoenix. The area’s natural beauty alone makes it worth the drive, especially at last light.
The combination of the desert mountain backdrop and wild horses in a February sunset is magic. The clean, crisp air and sense that anything could happen is addictive.
Last year we drove to the area twice and never were able to see any horses, but that was largely due to having no clue what we were doing. This blogpost is designed to help you (hopefully) actually see the horses when you make a trip of your own to the Salt River Region.
Let me qualify all the advice that I’m about to give with the standard “these are wild animals” disclaimer. These horses are free range and can move to and from wherever they want to in the area, so their patterns of movement can change at any given time.
A main feature of the area is the Salt River, which runs somewhat parallel with Bush Highway. Bush Highway has small side roads leading to different recreation areas along the river. The basic idea is to drive up and down Bush Highway, pull into each recreational area, get out of the vehicle, walk to the edge of the river, and look up and down stream for horses.
Last year, we made the drive to the area two times, and both times we had no luck. I’m not sure if we were just unlucky or if that is a typical experience. This year, in our first two trips to the area we again saw no horses. We were fortunate enough to stumble upon a man who told us about an area that he had seen horses a few days prior, so we decided to give it another try. This time we went to the Coon Bluff Recreational area and instead of just looking up and down the river, we walked East along the river for several minutes… and FINALLY we saw our wild horses.
The red arrow notates the precise area that we consistently saw horses.
If you would like to visit the area and take in a proper sunset from a great vantage point, this pin is a great place. It doesn’t look like much of a hill from the parking lot, but the view was surreal. The hike to this particular hilltop isn’t terrible, but it definitely doesn’t fall into the “easy stroll” category. We made the hike in twenty to thirty minutes with two young children.
Prime sunset location.
The view from the top of the aforementioned hill in the Salt River Region.
You never quite know what will happen in the wild. We were walking along the riverbank to get closer to a large herd of horses that were crossing the the river downstream when we heard a scuffle in front of us... As we rounded the corner, we saw this pair of horses fighting it out, right in front of us. Witnessing the brutality of two horses fighting in the wild mere feet in front of you is breathtaking. The allure of walking up on a scene like this is half the fun of visiting this area.
As quickly as the fight had started, it was over and the horses disappeared into the bushes.
Pure, peaceful beauty.
Your Phone Might Take Over Your Life.
Is the Internet Taking Over?
Will This Blogpost Make You Stupid?
Are computers and internet making us stupid? Over the last several years I have felt a growing unease with the steady march of our new technologies creeping steadily deeper into our lives. Cell phones and computers and tablets and smart watches and the like. Everywhere you look, people are missing the physical world around them. Grocery lines, traffic lights, living rooms, porches, gas pumps, restaurants… anywhere that we are afforded a single moment of opportunity, we reach for our devices.
How did we go from it being geeky to have a device with “the internet” to almost everybody having one in a decade or two? More importantly, how did those devices become so prevalent and pervasive that it has changed entire societies so quickly? I remember a time in which the ordinary trip to town didn’t even come with the consideration of people sitting around paying most of their attention to their devices… and I’m in my mid twenties.
I understand the irony. Writing a blogpost about how technology might not be that good for us… on my MacBook, posted to our website, and promoted on our social media accounts. Don’t get me wrong, I love new technologies! I’m here for the self-driving cars and smart exercise equipment. I’m not even denying that I get a definite bit of enjoyment whenever we need to buy a new computer or any other technology for the office.
The positive impact that technology has had on all of our lives is undeniable… In the general debate about how good or bad technology is, we often lose sight of the fact that technology isn’t just computers.
Consider watches. Before your average Joe could afford a pocket watch, the whole town may have only had one clock or none at all. If two farmers working in their fields had decided to meet at a local diner at noon, they could have quite easily shown up at a “noon” that ranged from 11:30-12:30 or more. If the first farmer thought that the sun looked like directly overhead at 11:30, he could have sat at the diner for a full hour before farmer who thought the sun looked directly overhead at 12:30 showed up. I’m no cultural historian, but I suspect it was not a source of deep frustration to the first farmer that he had to wait all that time until the other farmer showed up. That’s just the way it was. How would he have a good grasp of time, if he had rarely even seen a clock?
The technology of the clock, has completely reshaped our world. We aren’t even aware how much control the concept of minute by minute time tracking controls the way that we live. I’ve heard an employer talk of standing out by the parking lot watching his phone waiting to see if any of his employees showed up one minute late. They got three strikes, and then they were gone. Im not here to argue whether that is good or bad. My point is that those farmers at the diner would look at you crosseyed if you tried to explain the concept of being fired for being a minute late three times. The clock has dramatically changed the world since then, and we don’t even notice it. Again, my point is not that clocks are a bad thing… just that technologies change who we are.
“The medium is the message.” If you have spent any amount of time looking into the effects of technologies on us, you have undoubtedly come across that quote by Marshall McLuhan.
“Bless her heart” can mean “Isn’t she stupid” or it can mean “Isn’t she sweet”, depending if it is presented with the medium of sarcasm or the medium of genuine appreciation.
What does “The medium is the message” mean? Honestly, there are too many levels to the sentence to dig into in this particular post. An example of one aspect is the phrase “Bless her heart”. “Bless her heart” can mean “Isn’t she stupid” or it can mean “Isn’t she sweet”, depending if it is presented with the medium of sarcasm or the medium of genuine appreciation. The way in which a sentence is said is as important as the sentence itself.
This concept of the carrier(medium) of the information being as important as the information is often lost in the conversation of what effect technology has on us. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the information we are consuming on our devices is more important than the fact that we are consuming information from our devices at all.
While it might seem as though it is the same thing to let your kiddos look through your camera roll on your phone as it was for you to look through your mom’s family album on the coffee table, it is definitely not. I’m not qualified to get into the actual effects that devices have on our brains, but it’s pretty clear that they are mostly negative.
Something as innocuous as pictures in your photo app are presented with the flashy, short attention span glamour of our current technologies. While each picture could be the same as one in a physical photo album, they each present a myriad of decisions. Whether you want to or not, your brain needs to decide whether to pinch and zoom or to swipe left or right to next picture. Similarly, reading an Ebook with actual links in its text only serves to distract from the book’s message, rather than enhance it. There is simply too much information being presented for our brains to take it all in.
Does it really matter?
Maybe the new technologies of today are basically just newer, more fancy versions of the clock and written language. Although clocks and written language becoming ubiquitous were world changing, it’s impossible to say we are worse off with them. Again, I’m actually pro-technology…technologies are supposed to be world changing.
“pancake people… spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
When I see the steady march of connected devices into every waking minute of our lives, I wonder if we are going to end up being a bunch of shallow thinking know-nothings within a few generations. Or, as playwright Richard Forman put it, “pancake people-spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
Because we are so immersed in a culture of technology, it is easy to forget that we are barely even in stage 1 of a trial of how this will effect humanity. The ramifications of people sitting on their couches not saying a word to the person beside them, but rather communicating with whomever through a small box with a screen that they hold in their hand, are hard to project.
What is the Solution?
Recently, I had a conversation with somebody who did not have any internet-connected devices, and he was confronting the decision of whether or not he and his family wanted to begin to introduce the internet into their lives. He asked me if I had the choice, would I reintroduce the internet into my life or not. The question was harder for me to answer than I would have guessed.
If you could choose to just eliminate the pressures and time drain and change that our devices represent, would you be willing to drop the benefits that they also afford? I finally concluded that my answer wasn’t total abstinence. The world is far too invested in the new age of devices to turn back the clock, even if we wanted to.
There is almost no doubt that if we try to completely avoid the new wave of technologies, our children or children’s children will need to confront them anyway. In my mind, a better solution is to realize that this new wave is world changing, and we need to confront and accept it as a powerful tool. What does that look like? To me, it looks like not only realizing that it is here to stay, but also making a conscious effort to create boundaries in our lives.
Practical Application.
Never let your child use a connected device that you don’t understand.
“I have no clue what that thing can do” is opening the door for real heartache. If you don’t have a good idea what your child’s device is capable of, find out or eliminate it.
There are endless trapdoors for your children to fall into with almost every single connected device.
There are endless trapdoors for your children to fall into with almost every single connected device. Start with the premise that any connected device is not innocent. There are tragic stories of young children being lured into trafficking by “users” on their connected gaming consoles. Either figure out a way to identify and eliminate the traps, or eliminate the device. The risk/reward isn’t too hard to figure out when you take a few steps back and consider the emotion, physical, and mental damage that can take place in the dark corners of the internet. This doesn’t mean that the internet or all connected devices are all bad, just that they aren’t all innocent entertainment or productive devices.
As I have increasingly noticed the creep of technology into the world around my, I have especially noticed how omnipresent phones have become. Phones can transform a family from playing board games several evenings a week to spending every evening sitting around scrolling through Instagram in three years.
Create real, practical guidelines.
We have a standard of no devices after 7:30 every evening. If we need to use our device after 7:30, we need to ask the other spouse for permission to use it. That sounds a little crazy written down, but the goal is to create a barrier to devices just creeping into our living room and taking over every evening. Turns out, it’s hard to sit around on your device before 7:30 when you have a few toddlers.
A few easy places to start:
No phones at the table. No phones in the bedroom (no excuses about the alarm clock, you can literally have one on the way in 2 minutes with this link. https://amzn.to/3qxmavZ No excuses about emergency calls either… set your phone just outside your room or maybe just inside the room). No phones in the living room. No phones are short local car rides. We’ve even considered having a basket just inside the door that our phones can live in while we are at home but we haven’t made that leap yet.
The objective of these guidelines is to create an awareness in your life of the creep of phones into you and your family’s life. Try them for a week or a month. I’ve been amazed how difficult it can be to uphold even one of these rules and honestly we are still working toward finding the right lines and upholding ones that we know are good ideas. The whole internet world is spending billions of dollars to figure out how to get you to live in their world, and they are pretty good at it. The odds are, if you don’t create hard boundaries in your life, you or your children will almost certainly end up living in their metaverse… their online world in which you live most of your life’s waking hours.
Again, I’m not anti-technology, I just happen to believe that the real world is a better place to live in the long run than any curated Metaverse. Decide what you want your home’s device usage to look like and make it happen. For the past decade or two, we have been slowly overtaken by our connected devices, and that’s definitely not going to stop unless we decide to make it.
If you are interested in a more in-depth read on this, check out this book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. by Nicholas Carr. https://amzn.to/3qB23wG. I found it to be readable but also the author also took time to dive into important details and concepts.
Our Honeymoon in Punta Cana
Before Anita and I got married in September of 2016 we decided that we would like to spend our honeymoon on a beautiful beach somewhere in another country. We briefly considered some of the classics such as Mexico and Jamaica. We settled on Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, not necessarily because it was a much better option than the others, we just liked the location and decided to settle on it.
We knew from the beginning that we wanted to go to an all-inclusive resort on the beach. The idea of just sitting back and enjoying vacation without worrying about paying for meals and drinks sounded amazing. I’ve heard that if you run the numbers it’s considerably cheaper to just book your own tickets and rent a place and buy your own food, but we weren’t really looking to cut a lot of costs on this trip. However, it was more affordable to spend 10 days than I anticipated. Our total at that time was around $2800, which included food and transportation. We did end up doing a few extras (parasailing, snorkeling, etc.) that brought our total closer to $3500. Honestly the same experience in the United States would probably have been most of double that.
We booked through a travel agency, but they basically just booked us through applevacations.com. Honestly, if I had it over to do, I would just book straight through applevacations.com. Their search system is pretty good and when you are booked they take care of you from end to end, including transportation to and from the airport. In the end, we settled on Bavaro Princess Hotel All Inclusive Resor, and never for a moment regretted our decision. The resort has since been remodeled but it was already an incredibly beautiful place. The staff of Dominican Republican natives were some of the friendliest people I have ever met. A lot of them could barely speak English, but they knew just enough to be able to understand what you needed when you had a request. Their smiles and hand gestures were always sufficient to make up for the language they didn’t understand.
Pretty much every day, we would get at least one Pina Colada. Believe me when I say they taste several levels better than anything of the sort you can buy in the U.S. The resort had nine restaurants and several “drink” stations on the grounds. There is something extra fun about walking into a nice restaurant, being served by friendly people, and then standing up and walking out without worrying about the bill.
On average, the dining was pretty nice, by our standards at least. With the exception of one or two of the restaurants that were breakfast or lunch buffets, it was mostly cloth napkins and dress codes. The variety was pretty good, but by the end of ten days I was ready for non-restaurant food.
They loved making fancy desert plates that, on average, looked a lot better than they tasted.
The crepe station, on the other hand, had food that tasted even better than it looked. Our favorite was filled with Nutella and covered in raspberry sauce.
We also decided to go parasailing and didn’t regret that decision for one minute…
Actually, when this guy showed up to take us out to the parasailing boat we did wonder whether or not we should regret our decision. Apparently, the mask is more to keep out the sun than to hide his identity but somehow it’s still pretty unsettling.
Our view of the courtyard from our balcony.
We also decided to go on an outing with Reef Explorer. Basically you get taken 10ish minutes out into the ocean to a small manmade island. They have several options to try out there, snorkeling, paddle boarding, ocean kayaking, and that sort of thing. They also had and stingray and vegetarian (at least that’s what they said they were) sharks that we swam with.
They even included a short massage while we were out there!
A baby-faced, young, and happy version of us, leaving our honeymoon and heading back to the real world.
