Weekend Travel to NM - Pretty Weather in Phoenix

On Saturday, I traveled to ABQ and spent a couple of nights there, returning yesterday. When I got there, my father had just been released from the hospital and he looked really tired (hospitals are notorious for their constant noise and interruptions). He slowly seemed to be getting better, but I'm still quite worried: with his weakened lungs, a chest cold would suffice to kill him, I fear. Ah, the price of youthful (and middle-aged) smoking!

I passed through Phoenix for a few minutes Monday afternoon, on Southwest Airlines. We touched down at 3:15 p.m. (PST), and were wheels up again by 3:45 p.m. Because of the Phoenix storm, the plane couldn't leave Phoenix until late, first to go to ABQ to pick us up, and then return to Phoenix for the connecting flights. So, I had a screaming 5 minutes in the airport to dash into a different concourse and just catch my Sacramento flight - no time for even a bathroom stop.

Still, it was very pretty. The flight from ABQ to Phoenix passed mostly over a vast fuzzy featureless plateau of cloud, but as soon as we approached the Verde River, the cloud deck broke up into a riot of cloud and sky and sun. It was raining in North Scottsdale, but the sun was shining in Tempe and South Scottsdale. There were premonitions of funnel clouds in the clouds, I thought: the clouds looked "funny" over North Scottsdale, and there was a strange "plume" (too crooked to be a funnel, but still strange to look at) reaching from cloud to ground far to the west, somewhere west of Luke AFB. The streets and parking lots glistened with water, and as the plane landed, I looked backwards from my window seat, and saw the pretty rainbow that was tagging the plane - so pretty!

On the flight out of Phoenix, I was wedged in between two beefy guys, and saw little, but we did experience some nifty turbulence a few miles SW of Walker Lake, in western Nevada (which made me grateful for the extra padding on either side).