Away Into the Æther…

It has been six months since our last post. We did not go deeper into the gradient, become one with the universe or float off into the æther. We just went home to Kentucky. We made it safe and sound and we have had new adventures since then. Now, we can’t promise that our adventures in and around Kentucky will be as interesting to read about as those we had in Florida, California and Arizona or that they will happen as often. In fact, we don’t really promise adventures at all. Maybe we should call them “doings.” Whatever you call them, if you want to read about our lives and times join us on our new web log. We call it Jiggity Pig.

Goodbye to the Grand Canyon State

To all good things an end must come. Or so they say. We have loved our time here in Arizona. The climate (at least from September to March) agrees with us. All the things we want are available here. The speed of life, the sentiments of the folks, even the landscape all fits us in a way that we have never felt before. It just isn’t home. Home is where your heart is. Our heart is with our families. That means home is 1,772 miles away in Louisville. Today was our last day. We plan to be long on the road by the time this posts. Goodbye Arizona. Louisville, we'll see you soon!

Quaint Shops

Since getting back from that trip to Sedona we haven’t gone out and done much. We both feel spent as far as sight-seeing goes. We have been so many places in the last year the thought of going to see yet another collection of art or yet another Indian dwelling or yet another museum holds no appeal. We never would have thought that we could get touristed out, but it’s happened. It’s too bad because there is a lot more in Arizona that we still want to see. Maya wants to visit the Yuma Territorial Prison. Matt would love to go to Biosphere 2. There’s also the Wrigley mansion, Cosanti, the trail up Black Mountain and the Vulture Mine in Wickenburg. But we are just so tired of going and doing… That’s not to say we’ve stayed home all the time, or had no interesting experiences. We have discovered a few interesting stores that are worth a mention.

First up - a CD store called Zia Record Exchange. After hearing them on American Routes Maya wanted to get some music by Feufollet. They are a group of collage students that play Cajun music. It’s some really fun stuff. We didn’t find any of their music, but Matt did find an album he’s been looking for. Blows Against the Empire is a sci-fi themed concept album by a lot of the folks in Jefferson Airplane as they broke up and became Jefferson Starship. It was even nominated for a Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation. It didn’t win, but strangely none of the nominees in that category did. Anyway Zia’s – great store if you are looking for CDs or DVDs and happen to be living in the Phoenix area.

Several times we have passed a store called Pop the Soda Shop. We thought it was a 50s style soda fountain type place. It turns out it’s not. The soda shop sells sodas. Hundreds and hundreds of kinds of soda. Imported, gourmet, vintage, weird and wonderful. Most of them we had never heard of. Fentiman’s Curiosity Cola is a less sweet, more flavorful cola. Schartner Bombe’s Zitronenfruchtsaftlimonade is a very light limon-lime type soda. And of course they sell Jones Soda as well. We took our drinks to the park and sipped soda greatness under the trees. We would totally go there again if it was at home. Good thing they ship worldwide!

The last of our last little discoveries is the Sphinx Date Ranch. They have a sign out front advertising their world famous date milkshakes which we have seen many times. You can only see that sign so many times before you just have to try one. That is if you like date. Maya wasn’t really interested, but Matt likes dates enough to try it. It was good if you like dates. There were tasty little date chunks mixed in. As we were stepping out there was a tourist stepping in. Lured in by the sign, just like Matt. He asked us what else there was to do nearby. After six months here we know all about it! We probably told him a lot more than he wanted to know about Hohokam Indians, museums, hiking trails and obscure shopping. We feel like such experts of this city now. Neat little stores: just another thing we’ll miss…

It’s All about the Red Rocks

At the beginning of March we took one last over-night trip. We went north again. While on our way to the Grand Canyon we passed two other national parks that we wanted to see. We just didn’t have the time then so we made a special trip to see Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki. Since it’s too far to get up there and back home we had to stay the night somewhere, and where better than Sedona? It’s a big tourist spot. People have been telling Maya for months that we just have to go. On the way back we to Phoenix we planned to stop at yet another National Park: Montezuma Castle. It was a great trip.

Getting up to Flagstaff was no problem. By the time we were there, there was snow on the ground. It wasn’t very cold, but the snow was lingering. Sunset Crater Volcano is worth a visit if you are at all in the area. It’s a small cinder cone – literally a huge pile of ash and other loose ejecta – and it’s only 1000 years old. Most volcanic mountains you can name are much older. The other think that makes the volcano so unique is the different colored layers. Most of the cinders are black, but at the very end of the eruption, the color turned to red so there is this permanent sunset tinge to the mountain.

The other big feature is the lava flow. There is actually a few flows that cover much of the land of the park. The Bonito lava flow is an amazing jumble of broken rock that covers everything in the northwest area of the park. You can really see how it rolled along, filling the valley. Matt, big geology nerd that he is was really impressed by the lava. Can’t you tell? The park is a very picturesque place. We didn’t happen upon any place that wasn’t stunning to look at. Picturesque and lonely. When there you are pretty far away from civilization so there’s nothing but the mountains, the trees and the whipping wind.

That feeling of isolation is only stronger when you drive up to Wupatki. The park preserves the ruins of half a dozen pueblos of the Sinagua culture. It’s not really a culture as in “a group of living people”, but more of a system of adaptations to the high desert recognized by archeologists. Sinagua is simply, “without water” and refers to the way these Native Americans seemed to make a living in such a dry environment. Wupatki Pueblo was built in the 1100s and was the center of a community numbering in the thousands. It’s all built out of the red native stone and almost blends into its surroundings. Almost, but not quite. There is a whole complex with a ball court and a few smaller homes scattered around.

Wupatki is not the only ruin in the park. One of the others we visited is called The Citadel. It’s build of red and black stones at the top of lava-rock hill. This hill is right next to some kind of sink hole. In addition to a great view of the Sunset Crater and the San Francisco Peaks in the distance you can also look down into this immense pit. The fact that some Indian groups believed that their ancestors came into the world from a cave comes to mind when looking down from the citadel.

After seeing the two parks we headed back to Flagstaff and ate supper at Beaver Street Brewery. We went there last time we were in Flagstaff and the food was still amazing. The beer too! We took the “growler” we got last time back and had it filled back up. Growler is apparently what you call a half-gallon jug of beer. They had a Belgian style beer on tap, but you couldn’t get it in a growler so we got the bock instead. Also very tasty. The easiest way to get from Flagstaff to Sedona is to take highway 89A which travels beside Oak Creek Canyon for a while and then in a shocking set of switch-backs works it’s way down into Oak Creek Canyon. It’s like the wilderness version of Lombard Street (which we have also driven down). We had timed our trip so that we would be driving down the canyon at sunset. It was amazing. Once on the canyon floor, next to the creek and surrounded by Northern Arizona’s pine trees, it was more like being in the Smoky Mountains.

As a result of that timing we missed the thing Sedona is most famous for until the next morning: the red rocks. It’s the rusty red buttes that attract a lot of the tourist attention in Sedona. They are nice. The whole area around Sedona is part of a National Forest and for a low-low five dollars you can buy a Red Rocks Pass and park all the scenic turn-outs and trail heads. If we were to go again, that’s what we would do. There are trails and cool rock formations to look at almost everywhere. First thing that morning we took a look around the town. Sedona itself is not much to our taste. We walked the little strip and it’s just like all the other little tourist trap strips in all the other little tourist trap towns. Jewry, expensive art, gems, antiques, Olde Tyme photo parlors and the like. There were a lot of westerns filmed around Sedona in the 1950s so there are some plaques that commemorate that. If you are into any of that, cool. We just aren’t. We headed to Red Rocks State Park. It’s not in the prime location, but there are some decent trails. There’s also this house up a hill. It’s the dream home of a TWA executive husband and an artist wife. It was never finished because the couple split up, but if got far enough along to be habitable. It’s called the House of Apache Fires. You can only see it from the outside but we could tell that it’s flat, open and expansive, just the way we imagine our dream home.

After lunch at a fun little sandwich shop slash specialty imports store called Euro Deli we headed for home. Along the way we stopped at Oak Creek Vineyards and Winery. We haven’t been to any wineries in Arizona, but along Oak Creek and in the Verde Valley there are several. We tried their stuff and ended up getting two bottles even though they were close to $25 apiece. We got the Zinfandel and the Fumé Blanc. Excellent! Not as good as the wines we got in California, but certainly the best wine we’ve had in quite some time.

Still headed generally south we next came to Montezuma Castle National Monument. The park is actually in two pieces. The northern-most part is called Montezuma Well. It’s a collapsed cave that has resulted in a water-filled sink hole. Farmers of the Southern Sinagua lived in houses built into the sides of the sink. There is a small outlet from the sink they the Indians diverted for irrigation. The Sinagua who lived on the edges of Montezuma Well didn’t really want for water as there is the sink and a river not too far away as well. River or no, it’s still a fairly dry landscape. Then there is this pit with trees growing on the sides and ducks on the lake at the bottom. It’s like noting else we have ever seen. It’s Matt’s favorite stop of the trip.

The main part of Montezuma Castle is the “castle” itself. It’s a five story, 20 room dwelling set 100 feet up the side of a bluff facing Beaver Creek. The name is a complete misnomer, of course. European settlers in the area somehow assumed that the cliff-side dwelling was the last retreat of the Aztec Emperor whom Cortez had displaced 300 years earlier. No. It’s not. There was once an even larger complex on the ground nearby. The foundations remain. You used to be able to go up into the castle via a series of ladders. That practice was ended in 1951 when the volume of traffic started to threaten the structure. The way that National Parks preserve things sure has changed.

One last thing of interest: this is our 100th posting. There won’t be too many more. Our time in Arizona is fast coming to a close.

Looking Through Holes

Near the end of February we were looking to do something a little bit adventurous, but not too far away. In Papago Park, near the zoo, there is a rocky outcrop with an eroded passageway through it. This is known as Hole in the Rock. It is thought that the Hohokam Indians used the hole and where the sun rose relative to the hole as an observatory for marking the seasons. The hole is accessible from the steep face shown in the photo above. We took the longer, much gentler path that leads around the rock and comes to the hole from the back side.

While it’s not that high, the view from the rock is still great. It puts you up above all the surrounding hills and buildings. We just sat down and took it all in. What we found really neat about the place is that everyone else there was doing the same thing. Everyone was sitting down just looking at the vista. There were older folks, teenage girls, burley guys, us; everybody silent and looking out across the landscape. It’s like we all knew that this was some kind of sacred place. Some of that power still resides and ensures the Hole in the Rock remains a quiet retreat.

The next day we went a little further afield to another Hohokam site, Casa Grande. This is not to be confused with Pueblo Grande. The Casa Grande ruins are to the south near Coolidge, AZ. In addition to the platform mounds we have already seen, the Hohokam built a few multi-story buildings. The only one remaining is the one preserved at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. And even it isn’t doing that well. Structures like Casa Grande and the “Big House” here in Phoenix (known only from early reports) are believed to be observatories. There are a few circular and square holes in the structure that pass all the way through to the inner rooms. On key days of the year light from the sun or the moon would pass right through the holes. Neat! There is more to the site than just the observatory. The eroded walls of a whole city surround the main building. There is a ball court and a couple of platform mounds as well. Among the ruins we saw a roadrunner sneaking along. Sneak, sneak, sneak!

Hiking Through Superstition

The day after our trip to Quartzsite we went back to Lost Dutchman State Park to hike in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. Maya had recently bought some new Earth Shoes that offer her a lot of support. Matt had used some Christmas money to get a sweat-wicking hiking shirt and some hiking shoes with the express purpose of wearing them on this planned hike. We haven’t done nearly as much hiking of late as we would like to so we were both really excited about this hike. In short – it was one the best days we’ve yet had in Arizona.

The route doesn’t look that hard from the trail head, but it starts to get steep right away. The ground is all loose volcanic rock so going up not all that easy. We were both caught off-guard by the difficulty. But we had good shoes on, had our water along and were determined to make it all the way around the trail. It’s only a 2.4 mile loop. It can’t be that hard!

It was hard, but in a good way. At the top we looked out at the valley spread before us and posed with the shoes that had helped us reach there. We must clarify. “Top” means not the top of The Flatiron (the brown rocky mountain) but the top of the trail, which is not even up to the base of the The Flatiron. That was hard enough!
It’s not easy to capture the spectacle of the trail or the mountain or the views in photos. They jest aren’t wide enough. Photos and words, even, aren’t deep enough either. There’s something you feel about the countryside. The landscape really reaches into you. At least it does us. We will miss it.

The Wright Kind of City

We would we remiss if we did not mention at least once that Phoenix has a lot of public art (generally good public art, even) and a lot of unusual buildings. One local paper runs a column called Surreal Estate that profiles some of these unusual buildings. One article in particular about the Circles Records inspired us to go take a look. The picture we got of it isn’t that great (there’s a better one here) but the thing about the building is that there are hardly any straight lines. The front of the store (built as a car dealership in 1947) undulates along the street. It’s a CD store now. There selection isn’t super and we didn’t get anything, but mostly we went just to look at the building.
Maybe it’s because Frank Lloyd Wright had a summer home here. Maybe it’s something else. But the fact is there are a lot of striking buildings to be seen here. We’ve passed this one a few times and we always call it the Hanging Gardens building. Amazing!
Another place we’ve enjoyed is the Arizona Falls. When the canals around Phoenix were being built this outcrop was in the way, rather than blast it away, the designers just let the water flow over it. The falls became a gathering place for locals and picnics and dances were held beside the canal. Much later an early hydro-electric plant was built on the falls to catch some of that falling energy. The energy plant was eventually abandoned but recently it was renovated and now some of the water from the canal pours over the old gears of the energy plant and other streams of water arc out around a central plaza. There are several vantage points to look at the falls. The Salt River Project (the agency responsible for the canals in Phoenix) hails it as a fusion of art history and technology. That was our feeling too when we saw it.
There is also the Giant Baby. Not so much an interesting piece of architecture as just a giant painted-on-plywood baby. Why is it is a field in Goodyear? We don’t know. No one seems to know, but lots of people must wonder. It’s quite visible from I-10. This picture was taken as we drove past on our way to Quartzsite.
Coming back from Quartzsite we saw another strange thing from the road: snow! That’s right, snow visible from Phoenix. Of course, it was miles and miles away and almost a mile above us on the slopes of Four Peaks. Our little picture doesn’t quite do it justice so there’s another view here.

More Legendary Figures of the Desert

We have driven back and forth through Quartzsite several times now. It’s right on I-10 in the middle of the desert. We keep meaning to stop, but we never have. On 11 February we drove the 120 miles or so just to see the town. So, what’s in Quartzsite to see? Well, not much, actually. The “big” thing to see there is the grave of Hi Jolly. Philip Tedro was of Syrian and Greek ancestry and took the name Hadji Ali when he converted to Islam and undertook The Hajj. Later he worked for the French in Algiers and from there connected with Americans looking to use camels as military pack animals in the American Southwest. Ali signed on. He, seven other camel drivers and 100 camels arrived in the U.S. between 1856 and 1857. Here Ali picked up the nick-name “Hi Jolly” and it is by this name that (for better or worse) he is chiefly remembered today. After marching the camel train from Texas to California and back the Army concluded that camels could be used to transport supplies in the west. Not much came of the decision, however, as the country was bending toward civil war. Hi Jolly, the rest of the drivers, and the camels themselves were all allowed to go their own ways. Hi Jolly scraped out a living for himself in the wild west. He become a prospector and guide and occasionally even worked with “his” camels again. Near the end of his life he moved to Tyson’s Well and was buried there in 1902. In 1934 a large marker (still the largest in the cemetery) was erected over his grave from various native stones. The “last camp” of Hi Jolly remains an obligatory tourist stop.

Of course by then Tyson’s Well had been re-named Quartzsite. When it got started Tyson’s Well wasn’t much. It was just a well in the desert and a boarding house which served as a stop on the stage route from Arizona to California. The original stage station remains (somewhat renovated) and serves as the Tyson’s Well Stage Station Museum. The museum is simply chock-full of old maps, family photographs from 150 years, artifacts of pioneer life and WWII memorabilia. Like many of the other small-town museums we have visited, it does a great job of showcasing what makes Quartzsite different from all other little frontier and mining communities.

Not too far away from Quartzsite is the Bouse Fishman, another old Indian geoglyph. It was a little hard to find so here we present the most complete directions to the Bouse Fishman available on-line: Head north out of Quartzsite on Melton Ave/Highway 95. After about 6 miles you’ll come to Polmosa Road. Turn right onto Polmosa. You’ll pass through a RV camp ground. Past mile marker 7 but before you come to marker 8 on Polmosa there will be a gravel turn-out on the left. That’s the parking area for the Bouse Fishman. There is no sign for the geoglyph, just a generic “scenic lookout” type of sign. This confused us and we missed it the first time.

We ended up stopping at a second turn-out close to mile marker 11. We got out and walked around a little bit. The “shattered” rocks that make up so much of the hills and mountains in Arizona were very clear. It’s that kind of rugged look that we are totally in love with. We also so one of the tallest ocotillo plants we have yet seen. When we got back to the car, we noticed a sign telling us what this second turn-out was. The road crosses the smallish mountain range at Quinn Pass. It’s called Quinn Pass because a Thomas Quinn had his house on the site and a small mine nearby. The house is long gone but the cistern he dug is still around and apparently it has served many-a-thirsty traveler over the years. We decided not to have a drink.

Back at the correct turn-out we hiked the short distance up to the fence the surrounds the Bouse Fisherman. There was a plaque on the other side of the fence but we couldn’t see the geoglyph. After a few minutes of hemming and hawing we noticed that the fence had a make-shift gate in it. Basically a piece of that green sign post material with barbed wire tied to it was roughly bound to one of the main wooden posts with a simple wire loop. Slip the loop off and the sign-post-gate swings free. The geoglyph was surrounded by a smaller fence further inside the main one.
It turned out to be not much to look at. It’s much smaller than those we saw near Blythe, maybe 50 feet tall at most. There are some interesting other elements to the figure: a spear, water beneath, a sun above; but it was all fairly hard to make out. It’s not as dramatic and none of the pictures we took convey it at all well. Matt was wondering just the other day while looking up at the stars if the Bouse Fisherman is a representation of the figure we call Orion. In spring at this latitude Orion is leaning to the right and his left leg is noticeably raised. Red Betelgeuse could become the sun above and to the right of the fisherman. It’s possible. In any case, it is neat to have seen yet another ancient geoglyph. Next year in Nazca!

What Do You Want on Your Tombstone?

The second day of our trip to Arizona’s southeast was spent in Tombstone. Is there any other town that is so quintessentially Old West? Probably not. Of course, a good-sized chunk of the morning was spent in just getting there. The town bills itself as “The Town Too Tough to Die.” We don’t know about all that, but you’ve had to have been tough to get there back in the day. Tougher still to stay there. It’s in such a barren stretch of country. As the miles roll by on smaller and smaller and roads you ask yourself why anyone ever went out there at all. Like many other places in Arizona the answer is simple: mining.

And people did come. First came the soldiers to secure the area and protect potential settlers from the encroached-upon (and therefore disgruntled) Apaches. Next came the miners. One Ed Schieffelin was told that if he went to mine all he would find would be his tombstone. Thumbing his nose at his critics he named his claim “Tombstone” and the settlement that grew up around it also took that name. With the settlement came equipment suppliers, saloon keepers (there were once 120 saloons) and “ladies of negotiable affection” to take some of that silver off the miners’ hands. Last of all the hills around town filled with ranchers and cowboys. Tombstone was such a boom town that it used to be the county seat of Cochise County. Cochise was the name of the Apache leader that all these people displaced.

The former courthouse is now a state historic park and a wonderful museum. That was our first stop when we reached town. Every aspect of life in the old west is covered from mining and ranching equipment to the rules of the town’s number one game: faro, from aspects of the domestic to famous legal proceedings. It offers an excellent over-view of the town’s history, a general feeling for life in the Old West and some specific information on the famous gunfight. All day long as we wondered the many other shops we kept thinking back to the context the courthouse museum had given us. It made a great first stop. There’s also a tiny park across the street. That’s where we ate lunch. We had our leftovers from the night before. We also drank the last bottle of water from the pack we bought in Florida. After riding around in the car for something like 4,000 miles it ended up in… Tombstone.

Our next stop was the Bird Cage Theater. Maya was the one who was most excited about coming to Tombstone and the Bird Cage was the thing she was most excited about seeing. It’s supposed to be really haunted. We didn’t see any luminous shapes, hear anything weird, or walk though any cold spots, but there were some other people filming for ghosts and they said they felt something touch them. Irrespective of its paranormal aspects, it’s a really interesting place. It’s one of the few completely original buildings in the town. It was a regular theater and because there was so much money to be made in the boomtown many of the big name traveling acts of the day came to perform there despite the fact that it was so far from anything else. In addition to the performances there was plenty of liquor, lots of gambling and quite a few ladies of the evening. Maybe it’s best described as a saloon that also happened to have a stage. The opera box-looking booths above the gambling floor were where the various… um… assignations occurred. Downstairs were the really primo brothel rooms, in that they were actual rooms. The basement was also the location of the longest-running poker game in the Old West (possibly in history). People played non-stop for over 8 years and up to 10 million dollars passed across the table.

When the silver boom went bust the theater closed its doors. Nothing was picked up or put away, everyone was just sort of shooed out and the doors locked. No one disturbed it until the 1930s when it re-opened as a tourist attraction. The posters from the last performance still on the walls, barrels of whiskey still in the cellar, cards still strewn on the gaming tables; it’s this amazing time capsule. No wonder the long-dead like it so much.

Tombstone is also home to the world’s largest rose bush. The bush is certified each year by the Guinness Book of World Records. It currently covers more than 8,000 square feet. It rises up from its tree-like trunk and spreads across a trellis. You can walk under it and then go up a stairway to view it from above. It was not in bloom while we were there (that happens in April), but when it does bloom it is covered with millions of small white blooms. Those of you with access to a lot of old National Geographic Magazines, say every issue since 1964, can see a picture of the rose bush in bloom somewhere in the November 1997 issue. The bush is just one of the attractions at a former boarding-house turned museum. There are also some okay dioramas and (for some reason) a large collection of locks from around the world.

We made a visit to the offices of the Tombstone Epitaph. Founded by a truly accomplished adventurer and business fellow named John P. Clum in 1880, the Epitaph is today the oldest continuously-published paper in Arizona. Of course, it is no longer a daily, but prints large monthly issues with all kinds of scholarly and semi-scholarly articles on the Old West. We know this because Matt got a subscription to the paper. A year of history nerd guilty pleasure! How great.

Of course, the most famous place in Tombstone is the O. K. Corral. See, there was gun fight there in 1881 that has become somewhat famous. The O. K. Corral is today a big tourist trap with some kind of über-diorama called the Historama. We avoided it, but we went over to the gun fight site. See, the fight didn’t happen at the O. K. Corral. Briefly, here’s the story: There had been long-standing tensions between a group of ranchers (and occasional cattle rustlers) derisively called the Cowboys. Ike Clanton was a successful rancher but a known associate of these rough folk. In town Virgil Earp was the City Marshal, Morgan Earp was his deputy, Wyatt Earp was running for County Sheriff and their hard-edged friend John “Doc” Holliday was a saloon keeper. There was some misunderstanding between the two sides that brought Ike to town quite mad where he drank and called for shooting down the Earps. The city police, lead by Virgil, took him at his word. After a night a boozing and glaring at each other over cards (yes, Ike and Virgil actually played cards together all night) the Earps assaulted Ike and his friend Tom McLaury, had their arms confiscated and fined them for carrying the weapons in town. Later that day Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury came to town on ranching business along with another friend Billy Claiborne. They soon learned of the troubles with their brothers earlier that day. Rather than disarm themselves as was required by law, they were observed buying ammunition. The Earps thought of these new Cowboys in town as “reinforcements” and gathered to forcibly disarm them (ostensibly still acting in an official police capacity). In a vacant lot behind the O. K. Corral the two sides met each other. There was a cursory request from the lawmen for the Cowboys to disarm. One person from each side fired at nearly the same time and then everybody with a gun was firing. There were about 30 shots fired in about 30 seconds. Exactly what happened, who shot whom, and what each party’s specific motivations were is still debated. The aftermath is not is question. Among the lawmen Holliday, Morgan and Virgil were all wounded, but not seriously. On the other side both McLaurys and Billy Clanton were killed. We saw their graves.

We saw them at Boothill Grave Yard. While the town might have been too tough to die, people still did. There are about 250 graves in the Boothill Grave Yard. Looking over the graves into the distance one can really feel how isolated a place this still is. Projecting back another 120 years, Tombstone must have been in its own little world during its hayday. A very interesting town. Well worth a visit.

Musings On the Sonoran Desert

By the time we were back in Tucson it was well past time for lunch. After a futile search for a Taco Bell, we eventually went to a Jack in the Box. We had never been, but they run pretty funny commercials. Turns out it's something like a combination of all the mediocre elements from Burger King, Taco Bell, Arby’s, Captain D’s and Wonton Express. Burgers, teriyaki bowls, fish, some Mexican style items. Interesting place, if you like burgers, fish and Chinese. Matt had some sort of “nachos” that were really tacos covered in nacho cheese. In desperation, Maya got a grilled cheese sandwich. We also split a pack of jalapeno bites. Between the teenagers making out in the corner and the people talking loudly behind us and the locked bathrooms it was hardly a pleasant luncheon. And that kind of set the tone for Tucson for us. We kept discovering that Tucson is not at all like we imagined it. We had expected something more like Santa Barbara or Flagstaff, but it reminded us more of Cleveland or Cincinnati. Everything looks a little beat up, the roads are narrow, there isn’t much of that picturesque stucco-and-Spanish-tile architecture that’s so common in southern California and the southwest. It just wasn’t what we expected.

Making matters worst was that fact that the highway is under renovation or something. All the exits are closed. If you a going through the city, you’re fine. But if you want to get off at any of the exits in the city, you have to instead get off at the northernmost or southernmost ones and work your way back to where you want to be. This is made even harder by the Gem Show traffic. Yes, Arizona, with all its mineral wealth, is the center of the world for Rock Hounds. That is really what they call themselves. The Gem Show isn’t really accurate. It’s more like the Gem Shows. Of course, the main shebang is in the convention center, but that doesn’t stop anybody and (seemingly) everybody from selling gems. Everywhere we went, the parking lots were full of white exhibition tents. Even little parking lots next to grocery stores had at least one small tent. Gems Gems Gems, Your Fossil Headquarters, Welcome Rock Hounds, Gem Show Parking This Way.

Well now, the main thing we wanted to do that day was see the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It’s something like a zoo, but that’s hardly the end of it. It really is a museum of the desert. The animals are the main displays but there is more information about the workings of the desert environment to read and they animals aren’t the only displays. We started in an artificial cave. It was pretty accurate. This led eventually to an earth science sort of room. Cool photos of galaxies hang above the circular room. Around the walls are panels showing the stages of Earth’s geologic history as revealed by various rock samples. The samples are on display as well. It was neat to see the evidence science has for what’s happened in the past laid out in such a clear way. Another neat thing in the room was a relief globe made of marble. Unlike most relief maps it was not vertically exaggerated. It’s weird to think that even the highest mountains are just barely-noticeable rough patches compared to the whole surface of the Earth.

In the Mountain Woodland area we saw deer and prairie dogs. They also had snakes and other creepy things. Cat Canyon wasn’t that interesting. Most of the cats were hiding or something. In the Riparian Corridor, however, we saw a lot of neat stuff. Foremost of the animals there were the beavers. Neither of us had seen a real-live beaver before. They look so bulky and ungainly, but they can really move in the water. Also, they are kinda ugly. Maybe it’s just when they are all pressed up against the glass. The whole riparian (river) area was set up in a nice way. They have all these ponds at ground level for the otters and coatis (which we didn’t see) then there’s stairs down and a tunnel and you can walk back through the area but see the animals underwater. They also have a lot of fish in tanks along the tunnel too. They even had “den cams” so you can look in on the otters and beavers if they happen to be at home.

We saw bighorns and got to feel how massive their horns are. There were also two different walk-in aviaries. One had all kinds of different birds, from ducks to parrots. The other was just hummingbirds. Apparently there are more different kinds of hummingbirds in the Sonoran desert than anywhere else in the U.S. There was some stuff that we had to skip or rush through because the place was closing down almost literally as we left each exhibit. It would have been nice to have more time just to look at the landscape. There’s something abut the lumpy hillsides and the flat valleys all covered in saguaros that really resonates with both of us. We could easily have spent another two hours there. Easily.

When we got back into Tucson, we ate supper at a place called Zona 78. They make a lot of their own cheeses and import this amazing blue cheese from Australia (of all places). Maya got a massive motzarela, tomato and greens salad and Matt got the “Roaring Twenties” pizza. It was amazing food. We highly recommend Zona 78 to anybody happening though the area. We also shared an order of garlic bread, but it was so massive we could have shared it with a couple other couples. The wine list looked good too, but we didn’t get any because we had brought a bottle of one of our new favorites along with us. It’s Barefoot Winery’s Muscato. It’s just so delicious and sweet and usually so cheap. We drank that back in the hotel room and watched Futurama. We recently bought the whole series (and all the movies) on DVD so we brought along some disks and our DVD player. Good wine and sci-fi comedy cartoons: that’s an evening’s entertainment!

Mission San Xavier

We have been wanting to go to Tucson for a while. It seemed like a neat town when we passed through back when we were on our way to California. Plus, there’s a lot of interesting stuff down in the south-east corner of Arizona which can all be reached from Tucson. We made a start toward seeing it all in early February. We headed south for an overnight to Tucson and the surrounding area.

Our first stop was at Mission San Xavier del Bac. The mission is on the very southern outskirts of town on some reservation land. It still serves the descendants of the original people it was built to serve. As you come down I-19 (marked in kilometers!) you can see this huge white building seeming out in the middle of the nowhere. Some call it the White Dove of the Desert. It’s a really lovely building. It’s particularly striking because it’s so white against all that red and dusky Arizona soil. There’s also not much else around it to remind you that it isn’t the 18th Century. That’s how old the place is. A Jesuit named Fr. Eusebio Kino established the mission in 1700 at the Tohono O'odham village of Wa׃k (which he heard as “bac”). The present church was not begun until 1783 but that’s still older than most of the California missions. The architecture is Baroque with a few Byzantine and Mexican Renaissance flourishes. The artisans that did all the painting and sculpting in San Xavier (at least the folks in charge of the look) are supposed to have come directly from Mexico City so it looks a lot more like a big Mexican city church than a frontier one. They are just finishing up a restoration, so it looks today like everything has just been in stasis since it was built.

The whole look and feel is quite different than the missions we visited in California. Unlike the relatively isolated missions of California, San Xavier is just the northern-most of the rather thicker-on-the-ground Mexican mission system. These Pimería Alta missions were much more closely connected to the New Spain heartland. That’s why the got the artists they did and why they didn’t have to rely so much on producing everything themselves. There were regular commerce routes through northern Mexico. Unlike Tejas and California, where the presence of American settlers made the question “whose land is this anyway?” open for discussion, the southern third of today’s Arizona really was Mexican. The whole area is so Mexican that it was only added to the United States in 1853 when (almost as an afterthought) the Gadsden Purchase was negotiated. This last U.S. territorial acquisition on the continent was made so that a southern trans-continental railroad could be built.