Leaving Grand Canyon was uneventful, other than having our tanks still frozen from the cold nights, making it difficult to dump on the way out. We left south through Flagstaff and headed to Phoenix. Phoenix and its surroundings are strange—there are more strip malls here than I’ve ever seen in my life. If you want a pet food store, fear not, because there’s one in every third strip mall. We stopped at a Best Buy and picked up some things we forgot (card reader to get pics off of the camera, etc.) and after getting an appointment to get our batteries changed out (see Laid-Off Detour #1), we spent the day doing errands like laundry and more shopping. It was amazing to be in 92-degree weather after having just been in the teens the previous evening—no worries about frozen tanks anymore!
That evening we headed south towards Tucson. We pulled in to Catalina State Park, which was one of the nicer campgrounds we’ve stayed at. It was RV-friendly with partial hook-ups, looked nice and was cheap. Our neighbors were very nice and came over to visit the baby, see the Airstream and gave us fresh grapes. We planned to hit Saguaro National Park the next day.
Saguaro National Park is pretty, covered in its namesake cacti. The nature walks weren’t dog-friendly, and it was too hot to leave Lucy anywhere (we don’t leave her in the trailer in case a fuse blows or something, killing the air conditioner and turning the Airstream into an oven). After checking out the nature center, we took a driving tour, which was pretty nice. It turns out that the #2 threat there (after rattlesnakes) are freaking killer bees. They’re all over the place and hyper-aggressive. They attacked the truck most every time we stopped to look at something. The only way to get them to stop attacking is to run .25.-.50 mile from their hive. We never saw a hive, but saw tons of the inch-and-a-half long bees. They looked like scary large wasps to me.
Anyway, there were tons of interesting cacti. The saguaro are huge, some 20-feet tall, and they cover the landscape. Some cacti are in bloom now, but the saguaro don’t bloom for another month or so. I managed to get out of the truck and snag some pics without offending the bees, and escaped unstung. :) We decided to leave the next morning, heading for Tombstone.
Tombstone is the location of the shootout at the OK Corral. It’s a tourist trap, to be sure, but was worth a stop. The most interesting thing here is the Tombstone Courthouse Museum, where they have tons of historical items from the old west, including Wyatt Earp’s pistols. Wyatt’s house still stands, and is a for-pay museum, although we didn’t pay to go in. Fremont Street, the site of the famous gunfight, is still a dirt street, but is now lines with Disneyland-esque buildings which entice tourists with saloon food, western wear and ice cream. We walked up and down, getting rave reviews for our cute baby and nice dog, but didn’t stay long.
We left after a couple of hours, heading towards Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.