We got up around 7:30, Mom got in a quick shower, and I got all of my stuff together, got dressed and started packing up the suitcase. We saw what time it was and decided to go eat breakfast in the lobby and then finish packing up our luggage when we got back. We walked towards the lobby, took a wrong turn, but eventually found it. It was going to be a nice sunny day in the Valley of the Sun.
I had a banana, some cereal, orange juice and I brought with me part of a blueberry muffin and my yogurt I bought the day before. We ate our food and then went back to our room to finish getting ready for the next adventure. We filled our cooler with ice from the ice machine and I packed the rental car up while Mom checked us out. Mom broke her sunglasses in half, and we could not do anything else until we found the closest Walmart.
Luckily, one was nearby. We went in, she found some sunglasses and a pair of cheap flip flops, paid and left. I set the GPS to some virtual caches I wanted to do in Phoenix before we left and headed southeast. I decided to take arterial roads rather than jumping on the interstate to avoid the morning commute. Once we got to the Arizona State Capitol campus, I thought there would be more traffic and people wandering around. I'm sure there used to be before Covid now that everyone is teleworking. The one-way roads were odd and after three attempts, we made our way to the parking lot.
I made sure we had everything we needed to walk around, including spraying ourselves down with sunscreen, and headed to the capitol building. It wasn't as grand as the one in Olympia, but it was way better than the one in Salem. I opened up my caching app and looked up the virtual cache, Arizona's Liberty Bell (GC44DB). I answered the appropriate questions, got our selfie with it and called it good. We moved onto the next virtual cache, Arizona Frontier (GC4996). We walked across the street and into the plaza part of the campus. We noticed a ton of people walking around with white coats on. Was I going to be able to do this virtual cache?
We walked over towards where the coordinates were, and some guy asked Mom and I what was happening in the middle of the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza. From the looks of it, it appeared to be some sort of physical therapy convention. There was so much going on, I just walked up to the spot I needed to see (the seal of Arizona), took my photo and left. It looked like no one even batted an eye. I checked my phone for the next one, Inspired by Steve (GC4995) and that one took us to a Vietnam Memorial. I read what we needed to get from this virtual cache, took our picture and moved on.
Our last stop was at the east end of the plaza at the USS Arizona Anchor (GC44D2). Back in the summer of 1998, my soccer team and I, played in a tournament in Hawaii and on our down time we were able to go see Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona. It was my first exposure to US history and WWII in person. It was quite the experience, and you could feel the spirits of the people who perished on that battleship on that fateful day. At this geocaching location, the US government was able to salvage the anchor and put it on display in the state of its namesake. I could not believe we were actually looking at another piece of the USS Arizona. The virtual cache took us to a plaque we had to get a name off of. Meanwhile, the firefighter's memorial from the 19 Granite Mountain firefighters who died in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire. One of the deadliest fires in Arizona history. Someday, I will have to take a trip to Yarnell, just south of Prescott, to visit the site.
I asked Mom if she was ready to head towards Tucson and she said yes. I asked her if there were any places she'd like to stop on along the way and she said that we had to stop by the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Farm. She said the last time she and Dad were in Arizona, back in February 2019, they stopped by there and had a good time. We set the GPS to the address and got onto I-10. As we drove, the sunscreen I sprayed all over me started to irritate my eyes and we needed to stop. I saw there was a rest area coming up.
I took the exit to the Sacaton Rest Area, went into the restroom, used the facilities and washed my face...hoping to get the sunscreen residue away from my eyes. Mom hung out in the car in the air conditioning. We got back onto I-10 and there were several times where the semi-trucks did dangerous things. I had to come to a complete stop because a semi-truck decided to pass another semi-truck on the shoulder!! I am not sure how there wasn't an accident. We continued driving east being weary of the semi-trucks.
From Phoenix, it was about a hour drive along the interstate. We made pretty good time even though we had to stop for a couple minutes at the rest area. We got off of I-10 near a town called Picacho. We followed the GPS and arrived at the ostrich farm. Mom was way too excited about it and made me laugh. We parked, I grabbed my backpack, water and we went inside. We paid $14 to get in and a cup to feed animals. We decided not to feed the stingrays because it would have been extra money. The lady handed us our change and our cups of food. She gave us instructions on what animal eats which food.
We went outside and decided to feed the goats, sheep, ducks and chickens first. Then we fed the parakeets, the giant tortoises and then came a very memorable feeding...the lorikeets!
We went into the walk-in room and the lady gave us some rules before going into the lorikeet's cage. She handed us each a small cup with a lid, and she said to keep it covered until you got inside. She wasn't kidding. We went into the lorikeet cage and got attacked. Mom didn't hide hers very well and they took it out of her hands, and it fell on the ground. I laughed. I held mine to where they couldn't see it and took a couple pictures of Mom with the birds. Haha!
She got a couple pictures of me when I revealed the cup of nectar to the lorikeets. I held it out and they took the lid off and started licking it with their tongues. It was so entertaining and awesome at the same time. It sure made me smile! The lady was probably very entertained watching Mom and I feed the lorikeets. We thanked her for a good time and went to go feed the ostriches.
The ostriches were very hard core when you fed them. You definitely didn't want them to bite your hand. I dumped some of my food pellets into the wooden trough on the fence and watched them frenzy eat. They were so messy a lot of the food fell out of the troughs, so I picked it up and added it back to my cup to dump into the trough. They seemed to enjoy it. I did this about four different times and then decided that it was probably time to head to our next destination. Mom agreed. We didn't feed the donkeys or the stingrays...however, we did stop by the sting ray tank and pet them when we walked back to the building.
We browsed the gift store, Mom purchased a couple of things, we used the restroom and took a few pictures. We even asked a lady to take our picture at the sign and ostrich inside the building. We thanked her.
We walked back out to the rental car and stopped at the gate to find a geocache, Don't Bury Your Head in the Sand (GC7VZK1). It wasn't there but I didn't want to leave empty handed, so I got together a plastic baggie and a piece of paper and left it under a rock next to one of the sign legs. I wrote the cache owner, once we got back from our trip, letting them know I put out a temporary replacement.
I asked Mom which Saguaro National Park we wanted to go to since there was an east and a west. Since we were closer to the west, we just went to the west portion. I plugged it into the GPS, and we got back onto I-10 and continued southeast towards Tucson. I followed Nuvi's directions and made our way off the freeway to Saguaro National Park and their west visitor's center. We've been listening to my crime podcast and while we were listening to one of my Dateline episodes, and believe it or not, the episode we were listening to, took place near Tucson down a road we literally drove past on our way to the National Park.
We followed the GPS's direction and made our way to the visitor's center. We parked, put our hiking shoes on, grabbed our water, hats and my backpack and went inside for some information. We showed them Mom's National Park Pass, signed the guest book and picked up a map. I asked one of the rangers which hikes were worth doing. He told us about a few of them within the park and told us how to get there. We thanked him. I got a couple of things from the gift shop, you know, my standard postcards, a magnet and stickers, paid for them and we went back to the rental car.
We headed out to Signal Hill on the dirt roads that circled the National Park. After about a 15–20-minute drive, we made it to the parking area of Signal Hill. We grabbed our water, made sure we had everything in my little orange backpack and headed out. We followed the dirt trail and there were hundreds of Saguaro cactus and other types of cacti everywhere you looked. I've always wanted to come down to southern Arizona and see the Saguaro's. It's been on my bucket list for many years. I was so excited to finally be here. I soaked it all in because I had no idea when I would be back. Along the way we saw some petroglyphs on the rocks. They were left behind by the Hohokam people. We spent time looking at the different types of cacti and learning everything we could about the area with the literature we got from the visitor's center.
We found out there is no way to accurately tell the age of a Saguaro without knowing when it started growing. Like most plants and trees, the growth rates vary depending on rainfall, temperature, soil conditions and other factors, even within a given population.
The cacti that we saw that was roughly two feet tall was about 20-45 years old, about how long I've been here. The first flowers generally happen between 35 and 65 years old and on average they have been seen in the Tucson Mountains at 55 years old. They begin to grow arms sometime between 50-100 years and range anywhere from 8 to 20 feet. Old age and death is generally between 150-200 years old and very few individuals may live well over 200 years and reach 50 feet in height. We saw many tall, large Saguaros and they were so cool! I didn't want to leave but we had to. We didn't want to get to Lisa and Tony's house too late.
We walked back to the rental car but used the restroom before leaving. We didn't realize we were still an hour away after we spoke to Lisa on the phone. We needed her address, she provided that, we put it on my phone because the GPS didn't recognize it for some reason, and she said to see is in a little bit. We followed the phone's directions, and it took us over the freeway (there was a little bit of traffic because people were getting off work) and down the road near the Pima Air and Space Museum. This one of the places Mom and Dad visited when they were down there in 2019. It just kept taking us further and further out of Tucson. Where was it taking us? We eventually got closer and closer to their house. They technically lived in Vail, which is south of Tucson.
We arrived at their house around 5 and took some time to get organized when we got out of the rental car. Tony opened the garage to greet us. Lisa just pulled into the driveway as we were getting our stuff out of the trunk. She ran a couple errands while we were heading over. We brought our stuff in, we were shown our rooms, given a tour of the house and back yard, sat down and visited. Tony was in the middle of making dinner. He made us beef Bolognese with noodles. It was pretty good. He spent some time telling us about how he made it and that he was getting into cooking more since they retired. I told him about some of my cooking endeavors as well.
We helped clean up, Lisa got some cake out of the fridge, and we ate cake and visited some more. We talked about work, life, Covid, family stuff, Seahawks and other random things that came up as we talked. I was really trying to remember the last time I saw Lisa. I know it's been a long time. I used to see her every 6 months when she was my dental hygienist and almost every day when I worked with her. It got darker and Tony went to go get the fire pit ready. It was nice to sit outside in the warm Arizona evening. It was also clear enough to see the planet alignment in the distance.
We went inside after about an hour, got in some showers and got ready for bed. I chatted with Ben for a little bit and then asked Mom exactly what we were going to do the next day and when we were supposed to get up. I went to bed around 11:45.
Some notes on the day:
This was my fifth state in which I've been to their capitol campus.
We found five geocaches, four of them virtuals and one traditional.
I got to feed an array of animals in the middle of the desert.
My first-time seeing Saguaro cactus and this National Park has been on my bucket list for decades.
It's been at least five years since I've seen Lisa and Tony.
We walked 13,400 steps which is about six miles and drove 147 miles in the rental car.
Next Adventure: Nevada/Arizona Vacation: Tombstone, Bisbee and the Shady Dell
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