Sunday 2/27/11

We stayed last night with Gary and Karen C. who used to be our neighbors in New Jersey until they moved to Jersey City a few years ago. Two weeks before our trip, Karen and Cam had a 4 day gap in Arizona with no plans.  We received an unexpected call from Gary and Karen C. that after selling Gary's dental practice and retiring this past year, they bought a house in Tucson and wanted us to come visit them someday.  We responded, "Great!  See you in 2 weeks.".  So, here we are.

Karen and Cam had packed away all of our cold weather gear in anticipation of warm weather in Arizona.  Boy were we surprised this morning when we awoke to discover temperatures 30 degrees below the norm, and SNOW.  After a pancake breakfast, we bid farewell to Hank (their labradoodle), and began the day's adventures.

Our first stop was at the De Grazia Gallery of the Sun.  Ettore "Ted" De Grazia was a popular painter and sculptor in the 1950's-60's, best known for his images of big-eyed southwestern characters used in greeting cards.   Karen's mother even has some of his images displayed in her house.  He constructed a gallery museum and chapel to showcase his work.  The buildings were constructed of adobe, stucco, hard-wood from saguaro skeletons, stone, and native plants.

Next, we spent 3 hours hiking the Finger Rock Trail.  We had to stop just short of the summit as the snow on the trail made it too treacherous to continue.  However, we still enjoyed expansive views of the city below, and the beauty of the many cacti (locals actually use "cactus" for both singular and plural) bordering the trail throughout our climb.

We met a gentleman on the trail who was hiking with this feathered friend on his shoulder.



After a lunch at the house of home made bean soup and salad, we visited the Mission San Xavier del Bac ("White Dove of the Desert") on the San Xavier Indian Reservation, home of the Tohono O'odham tribe.  The mission was started ion 1692 by San Xavier, and the church was completed over 14 years of construction in 1797.  The church is still in active use.

Amazingly, Gary was able to guide us through 2 additional parks before we lost all of our daylight.  We toured Tucson Mountain Park and Saguaro National Park. We had a couple of very short hikes to get up close and personal with the towering saguaros, to examine the petroglyphs, and to watch the sunset.

Dinner was at an authentic Mexican diner specializing in hot dogs wrapped in bacon and stuffed with beans, cheese, jalapeños, onions, sour cream, and salsa, as well as "burros" (actually burritos, but too big for the "-itos" suffix).  We were serenaded LOUDLY  though out the meal by a mariachi with an electric keyboard and a microphone.

After dinner we relaxed at the house, watched the Oscars, and made lists of the movies we want to see.

Saturday 2/26/11

Although Karen and I had a lot of laughs together at White's City yesterday, we were not at all sad to bid farewell this morning.  We dropped by the motel office for the complimentary breakfast - a single plastic-wrapped muffin and 4oz carton of orange juice for each of the establishment's six guests, and a sign admonishing each of us not to take more than our share lest others go hungry.

Our plan was to drive to Guadalupe Mountains National Park today to undertake the 6-8 hour hike to the top of Guadalupe Mountain - the high point in Texas (8,749 feet).  Unfortunately, a major fire resulted in most of the trails at the park  being closed, and extremely high winds forced the closure of the trail up Guadalupe Mountain.  Consequently, we decided to visit White Sands National Monument near Alamagordo, New Mexico instead.  Cam managed to disguise his lack of interest in this site since Karen was so enthusiastic about seeing the massive dunes.  As always, even when Cam thinks he does NOT want to do something, he is rewarded when he just says "yes, dear" to Karen and ends up pleasantly surprised.  We had a GREAT 5+ mile hike through the dunes following the Alkali Trail, and making many detours over and around the ever-morphing hoary gypsum mounds guarding our path.

We stopped occasionally to empty our boots of sand by the shovel-full, and for a handful of photographs.  

The repetitious struggle up one side of the soft sand dunes, and the bounding descent down the other became a breathless rhythm interrupted by our laughter at one another, and frequent glances at the distant mountains and nearby wind-blown sand swirls. 

We even travelled a portion of the route shoeless - a pleasure that doesn't exist in the rocky and rooty trails of the northeast.  Today's sandy white glare and bright blue skies were quite a contrast to yesterday's underground excursion.

The drive from Alamagordo to Tucson was long, but uneventful.  We stopped mid-way in Deming, New Mexico for  quick dinner.  We can't imagine why anybody else would travel to the forlorn near-border town of Deming but if they ever do, there is a wonderful authentic Mexican diner where all of the food is prepared fresh on request.

 The balance of the day was spent driving the remaining distance to Tucson, Arizona, facing directly into a magnificent sunset. 

We drove 521 miles today.

Friday 2/25/11

There was no way we could possibly get lonely today with towering wind turbines pin-wheeling their greetings to us for the first 110 miles of our drive, and the oil derricks nodding their acknowledgements along the subsequent 100 miles through the seemingly endless wind-bent grasslands of west Texas and eastern New Mexico (a long sentence for a very long stretch of prairie!). 

One of the few places we encountered actual people was Jal, New Mexico.  We stopped for some gas and a burrito (actually, that could also be read “a burrito and some gas” depending on how you want to look at it) at a mini-mart, and decided we were fortunate we happened to be driving a pickup since that was the only type of vehicle to be seen for many miles. Who knows?  Perhaps it is illegal to drive anything else in Jal.

Carlsbad Caverns is the largest cave in the USA.  The main room is the length of 10 football fields.  Offered the choice between riding the elevator to the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns, or walking to the bottom, it was no surprise to Cam that Karen wanted to walk.  We enjoyed our 2.5 hour self-guided tour in the 56 degree Farenheit (year round temperature) cavern.  By the time we emerged, we were pleased to step into the 75 degree sunshine and take a short walk to view the valley below the Carlsbad Cavern Information Office which sits at the high point of this region.

After deciding between the elevator v. walking to the bottom of the cave, we were not offered any additional choices for the evening.  There was only one motel available within 40 miles.  The Roadway Inn was dated, and surrounded by abandoned and decaying buildings that once served as tourist magnets, but our room was neat and clean and afforded us a comfortable night.  Dinner was a different story entirely.  Our motel manager told us that the restaurant next door (also the only restaurant in 40 miles) was “very good”.  Apparently, she is not a very discerning diner.  The only items on the menu were tacos, hamburgers, hot dogs, or an iceberg lettuce salad.   Cam made the mistake of ordering the hamburger which turned out to be the worst burger he can ever remember eating (paper-thin patty, and a bun that was burned on the grill both inside and out).  Karen opted for the “salad and grilled chicken dinner” which was nothing special, but infinitely more edible than Cam’s.  Upon preparing to leave, Cam noted some new vittles-victims perusing the menu and warned them to go hungry rather than order the hamburger.  We should have heeded the warning when we saw that the “restaurant” doubles as the local laundry service (see red bags of laundry behind Karen in the diner photo).

Notice the alien at our dinner venue?  We see this guy everywhere.  That's what happens when you are in New Mexico where the aliens visited Roswell once upon a time, I guess. (Maybe he was our cook - that would explain that horrendous hamburger)

We drove 388 miles today.