Our View From The Road

It’s time to leave Tuscon and continue our journey. The days are definitely getting warmer here yet the nights are still chilly. I awakened this morning wishing I had my extra blanket last night. So, up again at 6:00 and out for my walk. Nobody else seems to be awake yet, probably because it’s Saturday.

Today will see us head to the most westerly point we will achieve on this trip, but more on that later. First, we have to strike camp and hit the road. A shower followed with a light breakfast sets us up for the day. Packing away goes smoothly and we’re off the site by 9:30. Traffic in Tuscon is light being a Saturday, but still as frantic as ever it seems, particularly the nutty motorcyclists that choose to weave between lanes and traffic far above the speed limit all while wearing just a tee-shirt and jeans.

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North of Tuscan the desert returns intermixed more and more agriculture. Eventually we leave the I-10W and begin passing lots of open farmland. It’s heavily irrigated from long drainage canals that run alongside the roads. Looking at the crop we were confused as it appears to be Alfalfa, in the desert? Sure enough, a little further along we see a farmer cutting the crop and sure enough it’s Alfalfa being cut in March! But for what?

That question is answered a little further along as we pass a huge dairy farm. Due to the climate the barns are all open sided and silage is ramped for use later in the year. This farm has to have in excess of 500 cows plus younger animals. It will not be the last such farm we see like this today, nor the largest.

We finally arrive in Coolidge, AZ at our first stop of the day, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. The site contains the remains of a village from around the 1300s. The main attraction is a large multistory adobe structure named ‘Casa Grande’ (Big House). There have been very few of these ever discovered and it is now protected from the elements under a large steel structure. The thought is that this site acted as an important trading site in the area and was important amongst the Hohokam tribes that lived in this area 700 years ago.

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Leaving Coolidge, we drove to the city of Casa Grande where we reprovisioned at Walmart and picked up lunch from an Firehouse Subs. Argh, it’s Saturday and everyone in town is out shopping. It seems.

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We leave town and head West on I-8W. It could take us to San Diego, CA if we wanted but our goal was much closer and far less occupied. Tonight we would set up camp on BLM land at the Painted Rocks Petroglyph Site and Campground near Dateland, AZ. $8/night without any services to camp in the desert away from it all. There are other campers here as well, but there is lots of room between us and so it feels almost as if we’re all alone.

In the late afternoon we wander around the Painted Rocks and observe petroglyphs that are 1000s of years old.

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As the sun sets the magic begins. One by one the stars appear, these is no light intrusion here as we’re far enough away from any urban area. The moon unfortunately is almost full which obscures half of the stars in the sky. However, those we do see are brilliant.

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At 4:00am I awake and take a look outside. The moon has set and now the sky is full of stars, even the milky way is visible, I’ve include a picture below.

As we extended our stay at this park by one day we have to move sites to accommodate other reservations. Not a problem as we have plans to go ‘off-site’ today.

Another beautiful morning, another walk about the park. It seems a little emptier as I walk about, a few more vacant sites than I recalled from yesterday. It is March 31 so maybe some snowbirds are beginning their migrations home. Not yet for us.

Today we are visiting the PIMA Air & Space museum. It’s just a few miles from the park so only took a few minutes to get there. It contains a large exhibit both indoors and outdoors of over 400 aircraft on an 80 acre site. Given its location the majority of aircraft are American but they do also have many from elsewhere around the world, including Canada, Great Britain, Italy, France, Russia, Germany and Japan.

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We chose to include a tram tour of the outdoor displays so as to get the narrated description of the aircraft on display.

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I’ve included a few of the pictures above that we took while visiting. We enjoyed our few hours and of course picked up a pin for our collection from the gift shop.

Returning to Lazydays RV Resort we acquired our new site for the night and proceeded to setup camp before going to the on-site restaurant and getting some chicken tacos and ice cream to enjoy on our site.

This was our last full day in this park and we’ve really enjoyed our stay. Although it was nice to stop and relax for a few days our adventurous nature is making us want to explore more of Arizona. So, check back again and see where we go from here!

Good day. So another restful night here in Tuscon, AZ. The morning sun rises early into the clear blue sky, yet it is cool at only 2C. I repeated yesterdays walk and then headed to the shower. The shower gets an 8/10 but there are signs that indicate the parks is renovating the comfort stations this summer.

Eggs & bacon for breakfast on the patio before retreating to the van for some reading. I picked up Andy Weir’s book, Artemis when we were at the Space Center Houston and today started reading it.

While I dive into the new book, Barb decides to do something with the Seville oranges we picked by making Marmalade. She had found that we have enough sugar with us for the number of oranges we picked. (BTW, shout-out to my Mom who later in the day after reading yesterdays blog suggested we make marmalade). As you can see below, it looks like it turned out rather well.

After our lunchtime sandwich we picked a few more grapefruit and then took a walk to return the picker. I captured a few more pictures of the resort to give you a better idea of the place.

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We enjoyed fajita wraps for dinner and settled in for the evening. I finished the book I had started earlier today (highly recommended). That’s four novels completed on this trip. I’m now eyeing up one or two of Barb’s books to read.

Tomorrow we have to move to a new site, so hopefully it’s as nice as this one.

First full day parked in Tuscon. I should have slept in but nooo, I had to be up at 6:00am for no known reason. Ok, time for a walk then. The park is large enough that I walked along every roadway and it totaled a 5km walk. Nice.

Breakfast included fresh grapefruit from a tree next to our site. Yummy!

After breakfast we spent the morning making reservations for the remaining parks on this trip. We are far enough along now that we can say for certain where and when we will be at a given location. This proved a little harder than we have previously experienced as it includes booking sites over the Easter weekend. We had to make a few adjustments and cut out a couple of places we had planned to go because of lack of site availability. The good news is that we now have all of the reservations we need and so can now relax and enjoy the days as they arrive.

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Just before lunch we visited the registration office and extended our stay here by one day. We will have to move to another site, but that’s not a big deal. We also borrowed a citrus fruit picker so that we can get a few more grapefruit from higher up in the trees. We also learned that the few oranges we can find are Seville oranges which are NOT sweet. More on that tomorrow.

During lunch we had some new neighbors pull in that have driven here (via Florida) from Burlington, ON. So we had a good chat and loaned them our fruit picker.

As the afternoon got warmer, 29C, we decided a visit to the pool was in order. We floated around for a while and then retreated to our site for strawberry daiquiris and to do some reading.

Barb spotted both a Roadrunner and a Northern Mockingbird on our site. We’ve been watching out for Roadrunners as we drove through the desert only to finally see one at our RV park site in the city.

Dinner was grilled steak, mashed potatoes and a salad which like all of our meals here we enjoyed outdoors. The evenings outdoors get cool quickly after the sun goes down and so after a phone call to my parents, we retired into the van for the evening to watch a little TV. I suspect that tomorrow will be a wash, rinse & repeat kind of day. Nice. 🌴😎

Three weeks into this trip and today will be the hottest yet with a forecast high of 28C. Ahh. 😎

To follow on from yesterdays theme of ‘Stranger things’, we awoke this morning to the notification that we had crossed into a new time-zone. Hey! Wait a minute, AZ is in Mountain time, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is… but they do not observe DST and as such in early March they do not turn their clocks ahead thereby effectively moving themselves into the Pacific timezone until October. We are now 3hrs behind our family at home.

Barb rates the showers here a solid 9/10 yet I feel I should remove a point as they decide to clean the restrooms at 10am a full hour before checkout even though the sign on the outside of the building indicates that they clean at 11am. Grumble.

Driving today is split into two parts, the first taking us to Tombstone, AZ and the second to Tuscon, AZ where we will be stopping for 3 nights.

The drive to Tombstone started on the now very familiar I-10W for 30min and just outside of Willcox, over the first mountain range the scenery suddenly changed to be that of a giants rock garden. The rocks (boulders) look as if they simply been strewn about by a group of unruly teenage giants. Of course, they exist as they do because over time the softer rock around them has simply washed away leaving these boulders to rest as they do. Quite a sight.

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Leaving the I-10W and turning South towards Tombstone we cross ranch land where the road simply cuts through a farmers ranch and entry and exit from the farm is made by crossing a cattle-grate. A smattering of Pecan orchards are still seen but it’s mostly open ranch land before after 30min we arrive in Tombstone.

Tombstone, AZ is most famously known as the site of the ‘gunfight at the OK corral’ but the town, like many in the West had its start in mining when silver and gold were found in the mid 1800s. The town has experienced three massive fires throughout its history and the mines have also been closed multiple times because of flooding. After each catastrophe many have thought it would be the end of Tombstone, but no it lives on earning the nickname “The town that will not die”.

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The town today lives on as a National Historic Site and survives on the tourism industry. It’s kitschy and yet not overly done. Sure we purchased tickets to the live reenactment of the ‘shootout’ that is performed several time a day but the town feels honest. The Main Street is unpacked and has horse rails and the sidewalks are boardwalks under the eaves of the storefronts. There are no modern establishments made to look like they existed in the 1800s, the stores are all small craftspeople outlets making and selling leather goods, jewelry, tobacco. The restaurants are old saloons that now serve food as well as whiskey. We had a great time, and would recommend this for anyone traveling in the area.

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Leaving Tombstone we were required to pass through a US Border Patrol checkpoint (you get used to these down here, even on the interstates) we retraced our steps North, back to the I-10W where we joined the highway into Tuscon. We are staying at the KOA Lazydays RV park at the SouthWest corner of the city. Although busy the site we have is spacious and has a patio and it’s own Orange tree (no oranges, Boo). There are however Grapefruit and Lemon trees about the park that they welcome visitors to pick and enjoy.

All for today, talk soon.