The Desert Southwest: Yuma and Tucson
Sunday morning we packed up and started on our eastward swing of Our Southern Safari. Leaving San Diego was difficult, because we had had such nice weather and so much fun. BUT, we knew there was a lot more on our itinerary and time was a wasting. We quickly left the green rolling hills, palm trees, and picturesque homes and entered the DESERT; beautiful in its own right to be sure, but definitely a very different landscape. I-8 (also much of it the old Historic US 80 Highway) is a fairly straight and unassuming road across the last part of California and into Arizona. Early afternoon we came to Jacumba CA where we visited the very quirky and interesting Desert View Tower. This structure was built in 1922 as commemoration of the early settlers that struggled across the desert. The view from the 4 story tower of the Anza-Borrego State Park was fantastic. They say you can see about 100 miles in any direction on a clear day. The most fun we had was hike up the hillside of huge granite boulders; they had build in steps, so the climbing was fairly easy even for the creaky old knees. Guinness was in his element, scampering a head of us and enjoying his exploration freedom. We then got back on the road, driving through El Centro, the Algodones Dunes Area and Felicity (the center of the world in a children’s fairy tale book). We stopped for the night at the Quichan Casino, just west of Yuma. We experienced some good desert winds; they seemed to blow all afternoon, through the night and much of the next morning.
Monday we headed into Yuma and found the Yuma Territorial Prison (not before we had to un-hitch and re-hitch the towed, cuz the parking lot was too small to U-turn in). It was an interesting place with well preserved grounds, showing the old cells and quite a bit of memorabilia from the prison and after it was closed the grounds and buildings were used as the Yuma High School 1910-15 after their school burned down, and later a hospital, homeless shelter and animal shelter. The setting is right on the Colorado River – near the narrowest point across the river. On through the desert we drove, stopping in Gila Bend for a Dairy Queen treat. We past Picacho Peak, just west of Tucson, the western most battle of the civil war, April 15, 1862 – 12 Union Soldiers skirmished with about 17 Confederate Cavalrymen. We arrived at our camp sight, tired and ready for an early night. We read the park rules after getting set up and realized that there might be a problem. The park rules referred to 20lb dogs, uh oh!! The office was closed for the night so we decided to lay low and hope for the best
Tuesday we decided we had better go discuss the dog size discrepancy that we had, for we were sure that someone had noticed. The office was very nice and said “yes” that there was a problem, but if we could keep them to out of sight for the most part, it should be ok. We are lucky in that our site is right across from the doggie park, so we try and sneak the Boys across when no one else is around. That being settled we found a dog park for the “guys” then we headed into the city and had a wonderful day touring the Pima Air and Space Museum part of the Davis-Monthan Air Base. What an amazing set-up, museums, displays and aircraft of almost any size or description. We took 3 tours: a naval aircraft tour led by a former Navy Pilot, then a tram tour takes you around to the planes that are tied down out on the grounds that surround the 4 hangers and the 3rd tour was a coach tour of the Bone Yard – where all military planes that are retired go to be either refurbished and to be reused by our forces or to be sold to friendly militaries from other countries, or used as parts or to be dismantled, destroyed, and sold as scrap. The planes were all lined up by type; in very straight rows; amazing to see so many military war toys from World War II up to planes flown in our current war activities. We ended our day with a good Mexican dinner at the El Charro Restaurant built in 1922.
Our last day in Tucson, we headed up to the mountains to see some of the famous saguaro (“sah-wah-row”) cacti. We had a tour of the Saguaro National Park – took a short walk into the desert floor and a 5 mile loop drive with 1000’s of the incredible cacti that can live to be 150 years or older. The little Prius headed us back into town where we took a quick driving tour of downtown, saw much of the University of Arizona campus and surrounds. Tucson has been great and we have enjoyed our stay, we headed back to camp to ready ourselves for hitting the road again tomorrow morning.
