Erci and I just got back from a wonderful trip to sunny Arizona to visit my Aunt Kay, Uncle John, Aunt Vicki, Uncle Darl, and cousins Kyle, Kurt and Sarah. Erci and I fell in love with Flagstaff. It is a beautiful small city with about a hundred years of history, gorgeous vistas of the San Fransisco Peaks (“the Peaks” to all the locals), lovely old houses and buildings, a university and the corresponding vibrant and lively crowd of students. Kyle took us hawking with Red October, his passage red tailed hawk. She is beautiful, and very attentive to Kyle. Riordan Mansion is fascinating, Meteor Crater was awesome, and Walnut Canyon was spectacular. We learned a little about Sinagua and Anasazi Native American pre-history and culture. The Museum of Northern Arizona is a must see for any one interested in Native American studies. Sedona, Oak Creek, and Jerome are over-rated, over-crowded, and over-developed. The limestone bluffs and red-rock bluffs are pretty, but the traffic and the freaky people are just too much. Bookmans used bookstores are awesome, the one in Flagstaff is only the first one we saw and already we were impressed. Lowell Observatory was spectacular. A much better observatory to visit than most because it is more accessible to the public and has an excellent astronomy sciences museum. We saw Andromeda through the big Clark telescope, Pliades/Subaru through a 10″ reflector, and Mars through a 4″ refractor.
We drove down to Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winter home and school. It was an impressive place to visit, beautiful and fascinating for it’s thoughtful engineering developments and architecture. Then we hit the Bookman’s in Mesa, which is even larger and more amazing than the one in Flagstaff. That was pretty much all of the Phoenix area we wanted to see, so we headed for Tucson. While the drive from Flagstaff to Scottsdale/Mesa was pretty (we went by Lake Mormon, which is nearly dry now, and Payson), the drive from Phoenix to Tucson along I-10 is absolutely boring.
Tucson is a charm! An old (for the Western Hemisphere anyway) city with lots of diversity. Tucson has the University of Arizona and Pima County Community College to draw lively young minds. There is a rich heritage of Mexican-Sonoran culture and cuisine in Tucson and we found it easy to get fabulous food. We briefly visited Ajo Bikes and met up with Milt Turner of Turner Recumbent. Turner’s new T-N-T bike is awesome! The T-Lite is also very good, but the show was stolen by the T-N-T. Amazing machine, I may have to replace my StreetMachine with one. If you are in the market for a recumbent bicycle, I strongly urge you to try out a Turner. Mr Turner has spent most of his life tinkering and perfecting bicycles, and that vast experience is really paying off. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a really awesome zoo and ecology museum where we got to see some Harris Hawks flying as a group and lots of hummingbirds up close (one kept buzzing by Erci’s ear). Kitt Peak was an interesting visit as well, though not as impressive a visit as Lowell was because most of Kitt Peak’s telescopes are reserved for real research.
South of Tucson near the Mexican border is where by Aunt lives and we thoroughly enjoyed the Mesquite Tree, Bisbee, Ramsey Canyon, and the San Pedro House. The bumber stickers in Bisbee made us feel right at home. The border surveilance and large number of border patrol vehicles made us feel uneasy. I sure wish we’d fix the problem of illegal border crossers at the source rather than at the symptom. We should be helping our nation’s neighbors rather than exploiting them then turning away their starving masses. We are also no longer entitled to display the Statue of Liberty, at least not while our borders are so closed.
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