Our Last Stay in Quartzite

This may be our last time to stay out in the desert near Quartzite.  We enjoy it less every time.  Especially this year with the weather being so windy and cool. And the RV Show tent has less and less interesting booths and more and more ‘junk’ to sell.  

We rode our bikes into town almost every day.  We went to the tent a couple of times, checked out the junk tents nearby and also out on the highway. We toured the town on our bikes and walked into the desert for exercise. 

Our friends, Dwight and Sharon, are camped about a mile down the road from us for the winter having been there since November. We had a nice lunch with them and had intended to connect up again but we ran out of time.  We did find pickleball courts at a commercial campground and enjoyed playing one day.

Nothing much changes in this desert community and we didn’t take a single picture the entire 7 days.

Pleasant Harbor

We are camping on a site in Pleasant Harbor State Park overlooking Pleasant Lake and next to a commercial campground. Our friends John and Susanna from Missouri are staying for a month in Anthem and two other couples from Sedalia have homes in Cave Creek.

Our first outing was to watch the AFC playoff game at John and Susanna’s for a Chiefs win over the Bengals.  We also went hiking with them a couple of times, ate dinner with them and the folks in Cave Creek and I spent a morning with a former Sedalian, Beth, at a small Farmer’s Market nearby.

It felt like a very busy week.

More to do in Tucson

We connected again with our friends Judy & Tom from Sedalia and went out to dinner a couple of times with them.

Then we had dinner one night at a restaurant called Locale Neighborhood. John made these reservations almost a month ago but it was worth the wait to dine on really good Italian food.

Before we leave Tucson I wanted to go to two highly rated tourist destinations - Mount Lemmon and the Pima Air and Space Museum.

Mount Lemmon towers over the Tucson valley.  It is over 9000 feet high with snow at the top. In fact, it had snowed so much two weeks before that there was still enough to keep the ski resort open.  We enjoyed the magnificent sights along the road and a nice restaurant at the top.

Then we visited the Pima Air and Space Museum, an all afternoon affair but very interesting. We explored several buildings full of planes.  Some were vintage WWI and WWII, some from Vietnam and some from more recent wars.  From small planes to giant commercial planes, from helicopters to fast jets, we saw it all.

How To Enjoy Tucson

This is the way we have explored the city and surrounding areas - by foot, by bike and by car. 

First one needs to keep an eye on the weather forecast.  If it’s going to be rainy, windy or cold you want to get in your car and drive around. One day we drove south to Green Valley and toured the Titan II Missile Silo.These nuclear weapons were put in place more as a deterrent to Russian aggression than as an actual weapon.  The missiles were three stories tall and were watched by four man teams 24 hours a day.  If a threat came from Russia, we were prepared to launch within minutes.  After the silos were closed, the missiles were removed and some were used to launch the Apollo rockets.

Other dreary days were spent looking for a meat market, checking out grocery stores or trying to find wood pellets for our new portable fire pit.  New Year’s Day was spent searching for an open BBQ restaurant or any kind of restaurant since I didn’t want to cook!

The occasional hot days were spent on our bicycles riding some of the numerous bike paths. One took us downtown, another out into the desert and another to a very expansive sports complex.

The cooler but sunny days were spent hiking in Saguaro National Park.  The East Park Tanque Trail was a steep trail that about did us in while the West Park was covered with saguaro cacti and has a more diverse selection of trails.  The Desert Winds trail was a flat desert walk while the Brown Mountain Trail took us up and across the mountain then down onto the desert floor.

And in between all these excursions we played pickle ball with our new friends from around the country - Canada, Iowa, Colorado and other cold states.