Cactus Joe's and other unexpected things

 We had a free Saturday and wanted to get out of town.  Didn't want to be cold, so we went south trying to go to see Red Rock National Conservation Area down by Vegas.  I looked it up and it said it was open...but not that you had to have a reservation to get in.  We found that out when we got there.  Rather than wait around hoping for a phone reservation to go through, we just took a drive (while listening to The Secret Garden) and saw some interesting and fun things.  We found Cactus Joe's - which was a very big nursery for all things desert gardening.  We found a couple of little critters to put on our backyard stone wall shelves and just enjoyed looking around the whole place.  Then we drove over to Pahrump and ate lunch in a park.  There were horses wandering around...we wondered about them at first and then realized they were wild horses.  We had seen signs all along the road on the way there warning you to watch out for wild horses and burros.  In town they had signs warning you not to feed them (or you would be fined).  I wish I had taken pictures of them.  There were 3 at the park and we saw another just wandering around town on a sidewalk on our way out of town.  Crazy!  First time seeing wild horses up close for me.  Wish we'd seen a burro.  We just had a nice day listening to our book and seeing what we saw.  (Except I had these crazy pains that we thought were a gallbladder attack and then turned out to be something else to do with enlarged lymph nodes constricting flow between kidney and bladder which ended us up in the ER for a while that evening. It was really painful that day, and some the next day - took Tylenol regularly.  Now, it's just sort of in the background and not too bad.  Seeing a urologist soon and may eventually have to have a stint they said.  Not happy to have this cancer stuff showing it's ugly head.  It could just be because my lymph nodes are swelling even more in reaction to my Covid vaccine shot.  We'll see.)  

Oh, and on some walks and on a bike ride recently I have seen some beautiful scenery and a Valentine Cactus!