Arizona Mesa Mission

In the valley in Arizona, around August and September, the weather changes and that causes these huge storms to blow in off the desert, and so you'll have wind storms. If you're anywhere near the edge of the valley, you'll have wind storms blowing sand in, and we were on bike, and so the sandstorm would hit and you get your eyes filled up with sand, so you couldn't see, just blinking, and then immediately you'd have electrical storms hit and rain and just go crazy and soak you pretty good. So that was a lot of fun. I don't know, I'm from Washington where the water doesn't come down like that, so that was always really exciting at the end of the summer to have the the monsoon season hit.

In Arizona, it gets really, really hot. So much so that if you open up the door handle too fast, it'll burn your hand. So one day, I opened up the door really fast, and I put my face down into the car to get in, and it cooked my mascara shut. Like, it cooked my eyes shut. And so when I got into the car, I had to pick open my eyes, which was fun, but it was an awesome mission, and the heat you just have to ignore, I guess.

So in Arizona, I think a lot of people have talked about the monsoon season. There was one monsoon season that flooded the front area of the visitor center. It didn't actually go into the visitor center, but in order to get into there, we had to hike up our skirts, kind of go King of Siam style, and walk through probably about two feet of sitting water, which was, I mean, the closest to swimming we were going to get, so we were kind of excited about it.

So as far as weather goes, there's not too much crazy weather. There's occasional dust storms that we call haboobs. I think that's the biggest thing in this mission.

Arizona heat is pretty crazy. I arrived there in August and I am speaking from experience when I tell you that driving with the windows down instead of turning on the air conditioning cannot possibly save that much gas. And if my companion at the time is watching this now, oh how I wish we would have turned the air conditioning on when I first arrived. It is very hot. Use your AC. June through September you can expect to see monsoons coming through and they are awesome. I absolutely loved monsoon season because it's so hot and then you just have these torrential downpours and they just kind of cool things off and make everything bearable. So look forward to those. They're awesome.

In Arizona in general, they have dust storms or like dust tornadoes. And when you see like this mini twister of dust, it's called a haboob, hubbub, haboob. That was really interesting. I had never experienced that before. So yeah, I guess it's a normal thing in the desert to experience a haboob. And it was actually so bad that we couldn't go tracting or when we visited families, it was like either an extended period of time that you were inside or just staying inside your own house and trying to proselyte from there. So look out for that haboob.

One thing about Mesa is that it's really hot. It is super hot, but it's like a dry heat. The dry heat isn't as bad as like a humid heat, probably as in like Texas or something like that, but it's still hot. Another one thing I like about the Mesa weather is that like at the end of summer there's always like lightning storms. In the lightning storms, you would see like just lightning, but there's like no thunder, nothing, there's no rain. You see like the skies just flash up and you just see like the lightning hit. And it was super cool. I loved it.