Happy Good Friday, and it is. I’d forgotten that Caroline would be off today, so last night, I was surprised for the second time to find out that we’d be able to leave for our weekend getaway whenever we chose. But this opened up a dilemma for which I wasn’t exactly ready. You see, all week, I’d been working on details regarding other trips by moving some days around, adding activities, deciding that we’d head out over the 4th of July into the Wasatch mountain range east of Salt Lake City, adding the Zuni reservation to the mix by nixing something else, and booking a night in a hogan in Monument Valley for the second time in 14 years. After juggling these hundreds of threads, I had to turn my attention to working out in greater detail just what we’d be doing this weekend.
We already knew that we were heading to Ajo, Arizona (garlic in Spanish) and then down to Organ Pipe National Monument for some hiking, but that was it. With a brain already fixated on travel plans, I brought up the map and knew almost immediately that we should simply go the wrong way. Instead of driving west, we’d go east. Ninety minutes east of Phoenix is Miami, and in Miami is Guayo’s El Rey, and at Guayo’s El Rey we’ll be stopping for lunch. A lunch of carne asada at my favorite place for just that.
After eating, will we backtrack? Heck no. We’ll drive another 10 miles east before turning south to make the long detour around Tucson before finally taking a quiet road to Ajo, where we are booked for the next two nights. But don’t go thinking that this was all I could come up with tomorrow; we’ll be having lunch at a grilled chicken stand in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, on the Gulf of California, though those details and the rest of today will have to wait for us to get underway. At the moment, we are sitting at King Coffee Roastery down the street from home while I’m starting today’s post, and Caroline is knitting away to finish the new pair of socks that she’s promising I’ll be wearing before the weekend is out.
No, seriously, I typically hate any food photos I shoot; well, the donuts a couple of weeks ago turned out okay, but I have no eye for shooting meat. But then I thought, maybe this is like nature images where nothing I capture ever even remotely is as appealing as what we experienced with all of our senses tuned to wonder, and that years from now, when for one reason or other, I can no longer enjoy the worlds best carne asada, I’ll be able to look back at this one and remember the sense of yummy it offered me, though the image of it was less than appealing.
The signs around town mention the poppies, but had we ever been in Miami to see them in bloom? Had we simply overlooked them, or were we so uninspired that day that we couldn’t be bothered? I do have to admit no small amount of annoyance after driving the road between Superior and Miami as speeding lunkheads plow aggressively over the winding roads as they impatiently need to arrive somewhere that always seems to be dictated by some kind of emergency if their driving is any indicator. It’s hard to stop and smell the flowers when survival and stress are wearing you down.
Today, with the decision to let time be damned, we took the long way around by going well out of our way to turn a 2.5-hour drive into a nearly 8-hour tour east, south, west, and a little bit north just so we could get out and smell the nearly scentless wildflowers of the Arizona Desert on a spring day.
I’ve never seen a thistle I didn’t like, though the same cannot be said after touching one of these spiny plants.
We’re on Arizona road number 77, traveling south; the astute might notice I’m looking north for this photo.
Oh, more wildflowers, we must pull over, or how else will we use all that time between lunch and the setting sun to occupy ourselves when today’s destination doesn’t hold a ton of things to do?
The reminder that the drive wasn’t all about grand vistas and flowers but included a good deal of brown, tan, lifeless, dull dirt, leafless plants, and desert stuff that isn’t always amazing in its repetition. Hmmm, that sounds cynical and like the words of someone failing to appreciate the complexity of what a desert embodies. I should never give in and take the world around me for granted; I, better than most, have a pretty good idea of the formation of our planet, the upheaval, and the chemistry that has been working over millennia to form every bit of organic everythingness that must be here for me to begin to make even the smallest of observations. So let me reframe this: wow, just look at this spectacular dirt being eroded right next to the road for everyone who passes to witness just one more bit of nature at work on our behalf.
Then the Santa Catalina range of mountains screams at me, “You even care a lick about that little bit of dirt roadside when this kind of majesty is here to astound you?”
After negotiating our way through the chaos of Tucson (Little Phoenix in its boringness), we were on the quiet and scenic Arizona Route 86 for the rest of our drive southwest through Sells before turning northwest on our way to Ajo.
And this is why you turn a 127-mile (205km) trip into a 341-mile (558km) meander, a great lunch, colorful wildflowers, terrific mountains, and a fantastic sunset.
But the sunset wasn’t over yet, with the shifting high clouds and the evolving glow of the horizon offering us a thousand beautiful views that changed with the curve of the road, the cactus in the foreground, and which part of the sky was capturing particular spectra of color.
Our motel is on the sketchy side, with the amenities not what they might have been at one time. With no soap or shampoo in the room, we had to track that down. Stepping back out of our room, we heard a commotion around the corner from the housekeeper and the girl from the front desk: they were dealing with a snake. It turned out to be a non-venomous western ground snake, a pretty reptile with its orange and black bands. It slithered away after we caught a glimpse of its snakeness, heading for a hiding place behind our room.
After we were done hunting snakes, we informed the ladies that we needed some supplies of the hygiene type and were offered the basics. What they couldn’t help with was the musty old smell of our room, but we don’t pay $77 a night on a weekend with high expectations anymore; after all, it’s no longer 2005.
With the A/C on and a window open, we took a walk out along the road under the full moon, the peaceful quiet of the desert broken by the sound of giant truck tires barreling down the road as the partiers were approaching the hour that the border into Mexico closes for the night. Trying to keep an eye open for snakes that might look for warmth out on the highway while being aware of speeding vehicles that might not see us, we strode along, enjoying the pleasant evening.
Back in our room, still too warm and funky, I turned to blog chores as Caroline tucked into the Kindle and her reread of Tracks by Robyn Davidson. None of this lasted very long, as we were tired following our marathon drive.
And so this was how trip number 7 of the year started out as we ventured into the desert for a mini-vacation close to home.