Our most favorite meal is our traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. It consists of a large roasted turkey, stuffed with sausage stuffing, accompanied with gravy, a nice salad, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls or bread, and all topped off with a pecan cranberry pie. Everything is homemade and is oh so good! We were so fortunate this last Thanksgiving to have most of these things when our friends on S/V Infini invited us over along with a few other boats to celebrate Thanksgiving last November while we were still in Simon's Town. It was wonderful!

Since Valentine's Day was coming up this past week, we decided to make this meal as a special "I Love You" treat. We teamed up with our daughter Christina and her husband Michael, and Michael's parents to make this feast. We all made a couple of the above dishes plus Jim, Michael's dad, make a special heart shaped chocolate cake, which is their family tradition for Valentine's.

Everything was delicious and as is usual with this meal, we were so full by the time we finished. It was just so hard to stop eating since each dish was made to perfection!

We hope all of you a wonderful Valentine's Day. We hope all of you were with the people you love if not in person but in your hearts and let them know you love them.

On Monday I decided to hope in the car and drive the 100 or so miles NW to visit the Casa Grande National Monument. Mary Margaret wanted to just kick back and rest some so I took off on this adventure by myself. Case Grande is the site of the village ruins of an ancient Native American Indian society known as the Huhugham people. They settled into this area around 300 BC and thrived here for almost 1800 years. They tamed the tough Sonoran Desert by digging a series of canals that channeled water from the nearby Gala River into the surrounding barren desert. This water was used to created vast areas of lush agricultural lands that supported the growth of a number of villages, one being located here at the National Monument. Case Grande is Spanish and means "big house". As you can see from the photo posted to this blog, the ruins of this large structure dominate over the rest of the village ruins.

It was discovered by in 1694 by Eusebio Kino, a Spanish Jesuit missionary who spent extensive time exploring the southwest and trying to convert various Indian villages to Christianity. The Huhugham people had mostly abandoned this area more than 200 hundred years before his arrival. The reason why they left is not known but it is speculated that a long term draught reduced the amount of water in the Gila River to such a degree that it could not long support life along its dried reaches.

The national monument was wonderful to visit and it had a great center which housed displays, artifacts and tons of historical information. The rangers there also gave a free walking tour of the ruins and offered a 30 minute film that gave insight into the ruins and the Huhugham people.

This week Mary Margaret and I also took in two great movies that were just released. The first was Kingsman: The Secret Service. The second was 50 Shades of Grey. We thoroughly enjoyed both and hardily recommend seeing them. Although 50 Shades of Grey is a bit risqué as it revolves around a relationship that uses bondage. That is a bit off our radar screen but the acting is superb and the sexual scenes are beautifully done.