A Dispatch from the Desert

In the middle of March, we escaped the never-ending Michigan winter, fleeing south for a much-needed week in Tucson, also known as The Land with No Grass. Although there are many bikers. And at least one bear. I'll explain.

At the Desert Museum.

The first thing you notice when you touch ground in the desert is that it is flat. We're talking see-your-destination-when-you're-still-60-miles-away kind of flat. It's very disorienting. We emerged from the Mesa airport (yes, the Mesa airport - apparently discount airliner Allegiant, which charges $2.00 for a can of Coke (credit only!!!!!) isn't bourgeoisie enough to fly into the highfalutin Phoenix airport) into the sunshine we had nearly lost faith actually existed, jumped on the highway and headed south. But to the right and left of us weren't trees or hedges or subdivisions; geez, even a curve in the road would've been a welcome relief. Nope: in Arizona there's no mystery. You can see exactly where you're going, making your destination seem so tantalizingly close when it's really no closer than it was when you last looked 10 seconds ago. It's the ultimate buzzkill. As they say, a watched pot never boils. But even the person who said that has never driven sixty miles in a perfectly straight line behind a car of retirees from Milwaukee with only misshapen cacti for entertainment.

At least we could listen to March Madness on the radio. That was the theme of the first four days of the trip, Thursday thru Sunday: non-stop hoops. With the occasional Fox News program thrown in for educational purposes (Fair and Balanced!). But after dissecting every possible lead and theory related to Malaysian Flight 370 ad nauseum, mercifully it was back to basketball. Both Michigan and Arizona won their two games of the tournament, ensuring pleasant moods for the balance of the trip, although the Geezer Squeezer's beloved Oklahoma State Cowboys dropped their second round tilt to the plucky Gonzaga Bulldogs. (Sorry Thelma!)

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If I may make one suggestion: don't travel directly from a wintry hellscape to the sunniest place on Earth without packing some industrial strength suntan lotion, and then, when presented with the available suntan lotion options, turn them down in order to "get some color". Upon arriving back in said wintry hellscape, you will acquire the nastiest, itchiest case of sun poisoning the world has ever known, requiring gallons upon gallons of Cortizone. This happened to a guy I know. What a dumbass.

Don't worry: this bear is dead.

On two occasions we braved the disorienting Tucson streets for excursions, the first a winding jaunt up the Santa Catalina Mountains to the top of Mount Lemmon, the second a trip across town to the Desert Museum, which is basically a zoo. But a fun one!

But first we stopped for the best fast food in the land, In-N-Out.

The scenic drive to the top of Mount Lemmon took us from around 2500 feet up to nearly 9000 over the course of thirty minutes of switchbacks, roller-coaster worthy inclines and declines, and intrepid bikers who were in the mood for some serious cardio. Every thousand feet or so we would enter a new ecological band, starting with the majestic saguaro cacti and continuing into small and large conifers and what seemed like never-ending varieties of shrubbery. My favorite road sign came just after the 8000 ft. mark, and indicated an alternate route of descending the mountain: "Caution: Primitive Road Ahead". Not wanting to put our acrophobic (look it up) driver (my dad) or our rickety rented Dodge Caravan (no power doors or windows? C'mon - this is 'Merica!) through what the swashbuckling locals would deem to be primitive road conditions, we decided to descend via the civilized route. 

Our adventure to the Desert Museum involved much smaller changes in elevation, but similar amounts of gawking at the scenery. The saguaros in Saguaro National Park line up like soldiers marching up and done the various ridges and hills, making the smaller, rounder, fuzzier prickly pear and teddy bear cholla cacti...the soldier's dogs? We experienced the flora of Arizona up close and personal during a "short cut" we took through the park, a seven mile long slice of hell Google erroneously convinced us was a good idea. Fifteen miles per hour on a gravel rumble strip can darken even the brightest of desert suns. Those German tourists who said we were almost there when we most certainly were not did not help matters. Danka schoen, Rolf and Helga!

Looking on the bright side, our interminable journey through the national park felt almost nostalgic, like a cowboy experiencing the wild Sonoran desert in its original state. Until of course we arrived at the museum and emerged into a crowd of yelling schoolchildren. That broke the illusion pretty quickly.

Our trip back to The House on the Hill (aka Thelma's Palace) was less eventful and thankfully more direct. (When told by our navigator that she had everything under control, I should have dropped a classic Geezer line: "That's deja poo." (Translation: Shit I've heard before.)) The ride home offered even better vistas of the thousands of saguaros lined up in formation, and the frustrations of the heat, the circuitous route, and the clueless Germans melted away as we headed back across town toward the mountains.