Cottonwood Build Day

Verde Valley was hoping to have us work on constructing a new home, but because of permitting and other issues they were behind schedule on even starting it. Instead, we were going to be painting the doors and outside of a house that was nearly complete.  Because it was a stucco house, we got to use spray guns, getting the job done much faster.  We were done painting before lunch.  Verde Valley provided us an excellent lunch at a nearby neighborhood community center.  At this point we were given the opportunity to either go to Sedona or a small town called Jerome.  Seeing as we were biking through Sedona the next day, everyone chose Jerome.

We loaded up the vans, and took off up the hill(quite the hill) for Jerome.  Jerome was an old mining town that became a ghost town.  More recently it has become a tourist attraction for being haunted as well as having all kinds of little shops.  We wandered around town for a while.  Some people climbed further up the hill to find the haunted hotel, but most people wandered through the small shops and restaurants.  I stumbled upon a shop selling University of Jerome apparel.  They had everything imaginable branded with the logo making it very believable. Now Jerome is a small town of only a couple thousand people, so I had a hard time believing such a University existed.  I asked the shop owner about it, and turns out, she had made it up, and was just selling apparel about a fictitious school.  I loved the story so much I ended up buying a t-shirt from there at the bottom including the phrase "minor in gravity."

We made it back to Mago in time for dinner(they don't allow meat on site) and then most people went to a yoga session.  I didn't go, but it turned out to be some weird meditation/yoga/random dancing session. As a thank you gift from Habitat, we all got a t-shirt, card, and a lotto tickets(since we were all "worth a million bucks").   We once again laid out and watched for shooting stars.  We got to sleep in the next morning because we have to wait for breakfast to be served at Mago and then it's 25 minutes back to get our  bikes out of the ReStore and get ready to leave.