Victims of the Vortex; the desert delights

    After being at the Griffith Observatory and all those alien landing sites along Route 66, I couldn't leave Flagstaff without a photo of the Galaxy Diner. What a great old diner!  Its current owners, who probably don't recognise what a gold mine it could be, have allowed potholes in the parking lot and missing clock hands.  It suggests that they don't really get what a little bit of hype and shine would do for this gem of a place, which harkens back to the era of Sputnik, The Jetsons, etc.  Boomers who are about to retire and travel en masse would snap their heads around and stop in for a meal and a photo.

    Leaving Flagstaff, we dropped down through 6000 feet, then 5000, and at Sedona we were at 4500. It began to get warmer.

    We made a couple of navigational snafus. We missed our turn-off to Sedona and had to come back at it from the south, but it was worth it. Oak Creek Canyon wasn't too amazing - maybe the wrong season - but Sedona and Oak Creek Village were charming, mostly because of the lovely red rock formations in the Red Rock State Park. The town has a pleasant dry heat, tennis courts, gorgeous scenic views, probably 300 days of sunshine a year, and lovely rounded architecture in a sort of modern adobe casita style. There are some amazing art galleries in Sedona too, and Deborah wanted one of the colourful wind-driven whirlygigs until she spotted the $3,450 price tag.

    Sedona is the New Age Centre of the Universe (one of them, anyway); said to be the site of fantastic energy "vortexes" - electrical ones, which are male, and magnetic ones, which are female, and electro-magnetic ones, which are neutral. My question is, if there is an electrical energy vortex, can you power your town with it? Your house? Your watch, even? Do ferrous materials fly into the magnetic ones - did one pull our truck off its course and make us miss our turn-off? Is a vortex measurable? Hmm...perhaps the very question of whether you can measure a vortex marks you as simply not spiritual enough to really appreciate or recognise one.

    Just below 3000 feet we suddenly saw our first saguaro cacti, hundreds of them like fence posts with arms, or chubby scarecrows, dotted over the hillsides about a hundred feet apart from each other. Saguaros only exist in the Sonora Desert, in a contiguous area that is shared by part of Mexico, Arizona and California; the Mojave Desert is just north of the Sonora, and in California. How can you tell which one you're in? Look around...if you see Joshua trees, you're in the Mojave; if you see Saguaros, you're in the Sonora. (I've also learned that avocados grow prolifically in California, but not here in Arizona - same latitude, but drier climate, I guess.)

    We lost and found our way around Phoenix, and saved the interior of that city for another day, continuing to Tucson, where we are staying with Val, our Tucson Couchsurfing host, and her two white cats, Einstein and Irving. We are Val's very first Couchsurfers. 

    Val is an interesting woman, a former disabilities lawyer with an autistic son who is currently retired into her bank repossession home, a former crack house which is actually a very classic, traditional adobe mud-and-straw walled home with three studio apartments in addition to her own residence. Her father worked in the U.S. foreign service - he once sat at table with Trudeau and Nixon, and crafted the Great Lakes Agreement - so she has lived in North Africa and in Ottawa, growing up, and has also built a home with her husband out in the desert. I believe she mentioned that her Dad, at 92, still travels to a law office he owns in North Africa.

    Her home has the wood rafters and ceiling boards, the traditional flat roof that you have to keep well sealed because on the few occasions when it does rain, it turns into an overhead paddling pool. Unlike many southern homes, it has a "basement" - the original pit from which the adobe clay mud was dug out to build the walls, with a wheelbarrow ramp still in place. She has tiled and painted and finished her home so that it is very pretty and livable, and she's working on the apartments one by one as well. 

    We decided to spend one extra day with her just so that we could do something to help her out; we'll be digging a hole for her new avocado tree tomorrow, and we'll make her a ginger baked fish dinner. Val loves to garden, and she served us "thistles" for supper when we arrived - no guff: delicious artichokes from her garden, which grow perennially, and they're actually a large thistle, she tells us.

Flagstaff to Sedona photos are here.

    The next day we explored downtown Tucson, which is hard to dislike. We saw St. Augustine Cathedral, the old Jewish Synagogue and museum - they were some of the earliest settlers here, in 1850.  Then we drove out 28 miles into the desert of the Saguaro National Park, to the Desert Museum. 

    This is a unique part of the world for us.  We soaked in the vegetation of the Sonora desert. Tucson is in a bowl surrounded by four separate mountain ranges - not tall mountains, but significant for views. The residential architecture is lovely, with rounded smooth stucco corners looking like adobe, lots of tile and desert plants in the gardens, and flat roofs. The higher you get up into the hills on the outer edge of the bowl, the more dramatic and impressive the homes are, and they're well spread apart but with no trees between them, so you can clearly see the artistry of their designs.

    The Desert Museum, international renowned, is not your usual dusty museum filled with old inanimate objects; everything here is living. It's more than a zoo, more than a botanical garden, and more than an aviary...so what else do you call it? They call it a Desert Museum. We saw cactus gardens and were lucky that it was April, when many cacti bloom. I learned the difference between yucca, agave and aloe, and could recognise and name more than a dozen native cacti from the Sonora Desert.

    Have you been in a butterfly enclosure? They're fun, but today we spent a magical half-hour in a hummingbird enclosure, the first such place I've ever seen. There were dozens of hummingbirds, five species, perhaps more, many of whom were tame enough to perch or hover only the length of my arm away, and one of which hovered six inches in front of me for ages, darting just a little from side to side, checking me out with great curiosity like the cuttlefish do when I meet them in the ocean.

    I wish I had photos of the hummingbirds, but that was near the end of the day, and my camera battery died after 119 photos. These are photos I took before the battery expired. 

    Thursday: we worked with Val on the apartment she's improving for her next tenant - I put together a ceiling fan and mounted it, while Deb did some electrical outlets and dug a hole for a new mandarin orange tree. Then we went to Tucson Tamales and had lunch; I think this was my first tamale meal. We drove around visiting a couple of other churches with representative southwestern architecture, old and new; the Benedictine Sanctuary, and St. Phillips church. We stopped at a great second-hand store with multiple vendors who have collectibles of all descriptions - a new fascination at every step, every glance.

Next post: the drive to Las Cruces