2020-21 Catch Up: Arizona

And now, rounding out our travel for the year: Arizona!  We were ready for another break from sh*t-school and my parents were newly vaccinated so we met in Tucson for spring break.  

After our nomadic Florida trip, the kids' only request was to stay in one place with a pool.  I found us a cute house south of Tucson with the requested pool and room for 8, planned a bunch of day trips because there was very little right nearby, and off we went!

Our first outing was to Saguaro National Park.  I was unprepared for just how many cacti there would be.  It really is like a forest with no leaves!  And so many different kinds of cacti!  We drove the full loop around Cactus Forest Drive, stopping at the various overlooks and trailheads to explore.  Alan promptly continued Fritz's travel tradition and got cactus spines in his leg.  Apparently it wasn't hot or strenuous enough for Henry, so he opted to run alongside the car for about a mile.  

By mid-day we were all thoroughly sweaty and ready for some A/C, so we left the park and stopped at the Pima Air & Space Museum.  None of us are that into planes, so it wasn't the sort of attraction we would normally hit, but we had promised our aviation-enthusiast neighbor that we would stop and look for a particular vintage craft that only exists at Pima.  He was working on a model and needed good photos.  I'm here for photos!  The kids mostly enjoyed Pokemon-hunting in the hangars and the adults thought it would have been much more interesting with a tour or docents giving some context.  

Our second all-day outing took us to Tombstone.  We watched the 1993 movie to prepare the kids for this.  Val Kilmer's performance has really stood the test of time.  We strolled up and down the main street and let the kids look for souvenirs before our shootout at the OK Corral.  The reenactment was perfectly cheesy and surprisingly short.  You realize the shootout is like two minutes of that excellent two-hour movie.  The real highlight was the Goodenough Mine tour, which had a great tour guide to give the historical background on the gold rush, mining operations, and Wild West culture.  The best part was when the guide told everyone that taking rocks from the mine was a crime, and Jane and I got to see Ingrid surreptitiously slide her hand into her pocket and drop some rocks on the ground behind her.  We had lunch in the Crystal Palace Saloon, where the waitress was in her full bordello corset getup and the actors from our shootout were playing pool downstairs.  Mediocre food, delightful experience with kids.

My third day trip took us to the West side of Saguaro NP for horseback riding.  We made a quick stop at the Sonoran Desert Museum on the way there.  I really had not allotted enough time to do this place justice -- it's a full-scale botanical garden with lots of exhibits.  My kids were probably happy we couldn't stay any longer for me to continue exclaiming over all the different kinds of cactus.  

We rode with Tucson Mountain Stables, recommended by my neighbor, and they were great.  Everyone should go there just to talk to Bob on the phone when making a reservation.  Technically, we rode outside the park, but the landscape was indistinguishable from the NPS territory on the other side of the fence.  The girls got to ride alone and Fritz rode double with me.  Henry is old enough to think trail rides are a little boring, but I was still mom-dorking out over the cactus forest-with-no-leaves.  We did do the loop drive through the west side of the park after our trail ride.  Beautiful, but not meaningfully different from the east side of the park.  Then we drove into downtown and found dinner at Borderlands Brewing Company, which had a great patio, tater totchos, excellent beer flights, and fried tacos so delicious that Henry ate two full adult orders.  Sitting on a horse for an hour makes a guy really hungry.

Next up, we spent a great day hiking in Sabino canyon, just outside Saguaro NP in the Coronado National Forest.  We did the Tanque Verde Falls trail, about two miles down into the canyon and along the wash to a waterfall.  This spring was exceptionally dry and there was no water in the wash at all.  It meant we could climb and scramble all over the place without worrying about getting wet -- though by the time we found a few small pools and the trickle of a waterfall, we were glad for somewhere cool to splash our heads and soak our feet.  Perfect length and terrain for us, really one of the best hikes we've done on any of our trips.  My parents, who are not big hikers, were very good sports about all this climbing.  A stop at Frost Gelato rounded out a really excellent hiking day.

We spent our final morning puttering around Tucson.  We went to the San Agustin Mercado, which had tasty food but not everything was open early when we arrived.  Then we walked to the Presidio museum, which had some very kid-friendly historical exhibits, and shopped for souvenirs at Old Town Artisans.  After such enormous effort, we were ready for more food, so we strolled to El Charro, which had extremely tasty margaritas and gigantic plates of enchiladas.  

Too much enchilada

Somewhere in there, probably after all these morning outings, we spent a million hours swimming in our little pool and playing Uno Dark Side.

The next morning, my parents headed back to STL and we headed off to fill our two random days between the end of the AirBNB reservation and the cheap flights home.  Might as well drive eight extra hours to check off another National Park!  It's what we do.  We drove five hours through surprisingly varied terrain (it was seriously like five different climates between Tucson and Holbrook) and cruised into Petrified Forest NP in early afternoon.  We went through the visitor's center and watched at the windows as a paleontologist dusted off the brightly-colored fossil of a teeny-tiny dinosaur.  Funny, even though I've seen the petrified wood before, it never occurred to me the animal fossils would be brightly colored too!  

The next morning, we went back to do more of the park.  We drove the whole loop and stopped at all of the attractions.  This was a lot more than I did when I visited in college, and it was totally worth the time.  We saw the petroglyphs and ancient village ruins, did the full hike through the Painted Desert Badlands and Blue Mesa, and saw all the giant logs.  Heidi and I oohed and aahed over all the different colors and patterns in the petrified wood.  We stopped at the extremely cheesy but extremely appealing gift shop on the way out of the park and let each kid pick out some sort of shiny petrified thing to bring home.   

Where's Henry?

So many pictures of rainbow wood fossils.

It's really heavy.

Our flight home was out of Phoenix early the next morning, so we headed off to stay in downtown Phoenix that night.  Phoenix is a weird place -- Tucson looks like it belongs in Arizona, but Phoenix looks like someone dropped a miniature Chicago in the desert.  Why so much glass and grass in a place with blazing sun and no water?  Anyway, our hotel was lovely.  Karl and Henry went out to pick up sushi for us all.  Apparently they had some very serious discussions about insurance and banking.  Meanwhile, I took the other kids to the rooftop pool, where Ingrid taught Fritz how to swim with his face in the water and no life vest!  Vacation homeschool for the win. 

We saw several other Edina families en route home the next day.  Because everyone hates Minnesota in March.  Just as we were about to take off, the stopped the engines and asked anyone with medical training to identify themselves to assist with an emergency.  Approximately half of the people on the plane got up.  Our orthopedic surgeon friend sat back down because there were like ten people more qualified than him to do triage (including his wife).  Arizona may have better spring weather, but if you get sick on a plane, you should pray it's a plane to Minneapolis.

As a final spring break bonus, Easter happened while we were in Arizona, but the Easter bunny had left eggs at our house anyway!  Our housesitter is the best.  

That was the first time we'd traveled for actual spring break.  Overall, I prefer taking skipping a couple days of school to take the week in February, which is when the cold is so intense that my soul is dying, plus the flights and hotels are cheaper.  But for this strange year, when we needed to preserve what little in-school time our kids could get, and we'd just been to Florida in January, Arizona was an awesome getaway!  I'm looking forward to going back sometime and taking even more pictures of beautiful cacti.