Tucson Revisited

Tucson, AZ   Feb. 28th Voyager RV Park and Golf    Site 5-160 Standard site    Highs: 60's -low 70's  Lows: high 20's to 40's

We left our tight site in Yuma at Foothill Village on Tuesday with the help of our RVing friend, George, who came over to give us an extra set of eyes at the back of the rig to pull out of our tight spot between a VERY close palm tree and the electrical box. Eldy did a masterful job of pulling out without having to back up and jockey the rig back and forth to get out. There was a big oleander hedge right in front of him but he didn't even graze it!  Sometimes an extra set of eyes is all you need. Thank you, George!

We had a nice but windy four hour drive from Yuma to Tucson and once we got here, we saw that an even bigger wind/snow event was headed our way. No problem! We are a well insulated RV and we got our three propane tanks filled so no worries.

Yesterday we wanted to go see the prolific wildflower bloom at Picacho Peak State Park that we saw from the roadside on our way here. Guess it's kind of a rare thing as Arizona doesn't usually get much rain or enough to trigger the expansive wildflower bloom but every few years. During a rainier than normal year such as this year, the wildflowers burst into bloom and WOW! Carpets of yellow and orange poppies everywhere! It was a little less than an hour's drive from our RV park in Tucson and was well worth the drive.

Picacho Peak State Park

We walked all around the park and took note of future hikes. Sparky went up a short hike called the Children's Cave and passed a grandma and her grandson on the way down. She heard someone suggest that the grandson help his grandma down the trail at a rocky part. She circled around the short walk to a little fenced off cave and on the way back down, she encountered the same grandma who had slid on the loose rock, fallen, and badly injured herself. She was bleeding from her head and arm, injured her ankle and possibly broke her ring finger which was swelling so fast it was turning blue. She was lucid and had called 911, but Sparky called the state park office to try and get a ranger out sooner for faster attention. Sparky felt bad for the young grandson, as he was so scared and upset he cried that his grandma got hurt. Another mom with her daughter and Sparky stayed with the lady till help came. Hope she is ok.....It just made Sparky realize that even if you think you can manage a hike with the bare minimum, you need to be ALWAYS prepared for yourself and others--hiking poles, first aid in a backpack, and enough water. Once help arrived, we left and decided that since a winter storm was coming that night, we would take the scenic drive up Mount Lemmon that we love so much so off we went to revisit that. 

Sparky tries to make a little snowman

They had had several snowfalls but the scenic drive was open. We started at the bottom of the valley at 63 degrees, and by the time we got to the top at over 9,000 feet, the temperature had dropped to 33 degrees. Beautiful vistas along the way, always spectacular whether it's a cloudy day or a sunny one.

The flowing water from the melting snow at the top had iced into mini frozen waterfalls on the rocks at lower elevations.

There are many pullouts and vistas along the way. One is called the Seven Cataracts. When the water is flowing you can see SEVEN waterfalls although they are quite far away. When you try to take a photo of all seven, the best you can do is about three of them. 

Sparky thought the Seven Cataracts was a weird choice of labeling (cataracts are related only to the eyes?) until she looked up the meaning of cataracts in nature:  AHA!

cataract--a large waterfall; violent rush of water over a precipice

We love learning new things! We did not know that!

Years ago we came to Arizona, and we just remembered it as being brown, tan and dry to the bone. No greenery except for aging saguaros (those tall cactus with "arms") all over the place. We really aren't desert people, but you can't beat the warm temperatures during the winter....haha....see below.

We actually didn't like the area years ago, except for the upscale Voyager RV resort that we stayed at back then. This year is totally different. We are seeing Arizona through different eyes, we love the mountains, we love the cacti, we love the difference in the vegetation, rain or not. But with the rain and the wildflower bloom this year, it has really brightened the landscape everywhere. There is even stubby grass growing in the desert! The weather has been all over the place. We've had two dust storms and more rain and several big wind days with gusts over 45 mph. and the locals say that is very unusual. Here in Tucson, it was 86 degrees last year on March 2! This year it was 31 degrees this morning when we woke up to this:

It was so weird seeing the heavy snow covering the palm trees! It didn't stick on the ground and rapidly melted as the day warmed up. Sparky still loves seeing snow. 

It felt like Christmas morning when you wake up as a little kid, hoping it snowed the night before so Santa could make it down the chimney.

view outside our bedroom window

endangered Gila topminnow

This weekend it's going to be 72 and totally sunny....Sparky will ride the Loop bike trail a time or two. This time she rode a section of The Loop bike trail over by Sweetwater Wetlands, a very small park with birding and wildlife viewing. She saw these stenciled fish along the trail and wondered what that was all about? 

It turns out that the endangered Gila topminnow, a native Sonoran desert fish was discovered in the Santa Cruz River in Tucson. A conservation artist, Kimi Eisele, was chosen to depict the fish along the Santa Cruz River to connect the public with the fish and the flowing river. The fish came back to the ecosystem because of the treated wastewater. Since the 1970's, the highly treated wastewater, the effluent, has created a green riparian corridor for over 20 miles and the Gila topminnow are back!

The photo at the upper right guides the cyclist or walker or casual pedestrian to a platform overlooking a very low flowing stream, but apparently, the minnow must be in there. The beautiful fish stencils most definitely engage your interest! AND, if you are lucky, you might see a roadrunner or two along the dry, desert washes. Sparky saw TWO on her last ride.

However, the trash all along and inside the washes (the dry riverbeds for the heavy monsoon season in the summers) is NOT very attractive. It was sad to see all the debris left behind by people and how it all ends up in the washes is another story and probably a big problem for Tucson. It's got to end up in storm drains or clogging the system somewhere. Signs even warn you not to traverse portions of the trail if flooded due to the debris that will be deposited.

Monday we leave for Fort Davis State Park in Arizona for a few days, which is very close to the McDonald Observatory. That place has very cool star gazing programs. Unfortunately, there are no openings available for the short sty we are there, but it is HIGHLY recommended by many.....

Always an adventure, this travel lifestyle! This will be a new stop for us at Fort Davis State Park. You never know what's going to be around the corner...Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Two Weeks in Tucson

Saguaro (suh-war-oh) cactus in Tucson

Tucson, AZ.  Christmas Week -- Highs: bouncing around all over the place, from high seventies to high 50's.   Lows: 37 to 51
 Wifi connectivity is sometimes very good with AT &T (hotspots) and then it isn't. It can vary from hour to hour and minute to minute as far as signal strength. T-Mobile is terrible. Guess the mountains are in play here? Or winter storm Elliot all across the country? Or the guy that has a big ham radio antenna less than 10 feet from us?

With a huge sign of relief, after outdriving and missing the severe cold freezes all across the southwest, we settled into our site here in Tucson, AZ, at the Voyager RV Resort. The resort is beautiful, even though we are basically sitting in a gravel parking lot, the rest of the park's facilities are amazing! And the views of the five mountain ranges all around Tucson are terrific! Sparky has posted some FB photos of the mountains all around us and some beautiful sunsets. They bear repeating, so here they are. 

Site 3-163

The last couple of parks we have stayed at have had electrical issues and this big resort is no different. We were placed into a very tight site instead of a more spacious one because there were electrical problems in several rows where we were originally going to be. But why they jam people up right next to each other when the park is quite open and empty is a mystery. There's a rig on each side of us, then the rest of the row is empty all the way down. 

The park gave us a standard site--the standard sites are very long but very narrow. Premium pull thru sites are a little wider, but they told us they were not available because of the electric problems. At least your neighbors' rig placements are offset a bit so you aren't looking directly into their windows next to you.

The Voyager is a true resort--LOTS of pickle ball courts (16?) with serious playing going on....Sparky really wants to play but is worried about reinsuring an Achilles heel...Maybe she will go into it with the idea of just dinking the ball around. Sparky is quite competitive and it's hard for her not to go all out, so we'll see....This is a good time to play as the official playing season with all the regulars doesn't really get going until Jan. 1, when the seasonals arrive in droves. We heard that there are 100 RVs coming in January 1st! There are two pools, and wouldn't you know,  the main pool is being resurfaced so it's not available until early January, when we leave. There are classes galore here and all kinds of hobbies and crafts. We stay at this park as a destination on our way to Cottonwood, AZ, (where we stay for free with our Thousand Trails membership at Verde Valley), so we can only enjoy this resort for a couple of weeks to best fit our traveling budget. Because this park is a subsidiary membership park to our Thousand Trails park membership, it only costs us 20.00 a day, but membership benefits stipulate we can only stay for a two week max at any one time. If we wanted to stay longer, we could, but then we pay the public going rates for longer stays. Currently, a skinny standard pull through site for the month of January is $1,023.00, which really isn't bad considering this is a destination park. Here is a list of all the activities:

There is a hotel in the park, and an extensive year round resident section of beautiful homes to one side of the park, a small golf course, a resident post office, an an on site restaurant called Fat Willies, which serves very good food--breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

There's a really nice weight/exercise room, too...

Sparky's favorite part of the resort is the courtyard area...a great place to relax, read a book, grill out at one of the BBQ grill stations, watch the pickle ballers play, or listen to Native American flute playing. (There is even a group for that!)

"Batty Bikers"

And of course, there is an amazing bike trail around Tucson, called The Loop, which consists of over 100 miles of paved bikeway. Some of it goes through residential areas and spurs leading to other parts, and a LOT of it is on the outskirts of Tucson. It has amazing art installations along the way. The photo at left is a reminder that under some of the Tucson bridges are huge bat colonies. Forty thousand Mexican free tail bats live under the Campbell Avenue Bridge, but you won't see them in the winter here. They have migrated south. Fall is the peak season for the bats. They like the bridges because they are safe and cool, as in temperature. The deep grooves in the expansion joints provide an excellent roosting place. To protect the expansion joints, Pima County installed bat boxes so they can roost. 

A lot of the bridges are really cool in design as well, and some of the bridges are considered part of the art installations as well. One of the bridges, the Aho/Irvington Bridge has a cement pattern intaglio design that was taken from the tire tracks left in the river bed underneath it! (See above photo).

It's a little confusing where some of these art installations are when you compare the maps online to where the actually installations are. It also depends on which side of the river banks and washes you are riding on as to whether you will see all of them listed on the map. But it's a great bike adventure and great exercise to go looking for them!

Sparky has written about the Chuck Huckleberry Loop in the past and you can reference it by typing in "the Loop". in the blog search box, too. Hope these links work! 

In the two weeks we were here, Sparky rode the trail several times, particularly the Julian Walsh portion of the trail, which is quite close to the RV park. It has changed a little from last year in that there are more homeless people in the brush off the trail at several points along the way, living in tents and tarps. But because the trail is frequently used, they are far back and keep to themselves. Sparky never worried about riding the trail and never saw any people moving around there during the day.

There is a map of the art installations on the trail available online, The Loop Art Map and just to show you some more of the art on the Loop trail, here is another link to a portion Sparky did last year from Udall Park, the trailhead that is a few more miles down on Kolb Rd., the road the resort is on. You can reference the previous post at this link 

 art on the Loop Trail There are more than four dozen art installations on the trail, it is said. Bridges count as artwork, too! (see below photo) Sparky rode a record 36 miles one day, trying to find new artwork that was further along the trail than last year's search, but she picked the wrong trailhead to start, and possibly rode on the wrong side of the trail (there are two sides to the Loop trail in most places). So she got too tired after about 18 miles one way before having to turn around to make it back, not having found the artwork in the Rillito River Park area. But it's there! She's going to try again before we leave. 

The Loop Trail-one of the bridges

The weather is so fantastic here that this is a really great ride! Although we did hear a native say that the weather has been really "weird" here this year. Whatever he meant by that, we aren't sure. At any rate, we highly recommend checking out different portions of the trail leaving from different trailheads. Tucson is supposed to be the "bike capital of the world", or so they say....

Almost there!

The last thing we did besides enjoy a quiet Christmas holiday, was to take a drive along the Catalina Highway, to revisit Mt. Lemmon, which has an elevation of 9,000 feet at the top. It's a scenic drive of 27 miles one way. That's where Tucsonans (not Tucsonians, say the locals) go to escape the summer heat and where cyclists go to train, climbing all the way to 9,000 feet on their road bikes. Wow! There were a lot of people with the same idea to come to Mt. Lemmon Christmas Day to picnic, frolic in the snow, and make holiday memories. 

We love seeing families come from the dry sunny valley up to the mountain to try and sled, build a little snowman and throw snowballs at each other! It doesn't take much to make kids happy. Kids were sledding down wee little bumps of a hill on cardboard. We saw one family "burying" their son in the snow, just like you might bury a kid at the beach, everybody giggling and laughing. It was only 43 degrees--a lot better than up north in storm Elliot!

One family's snowman, er, snow lady

And, you get to see some fantastic scenery...At one of the many overlooks, we spotted a small waterfall cascading down. That's quite small but it was far away...

There are hoodoos along the way. A hoodoo is a column or pinnacle of weathered rock, sort of like this one....There are far more spectacular ones out in Bryce Canyon and Utah, but this gives you an idea. The gray sliver is the road on the way up to the top.

It's fun to stop at the many overlooks....to see all the different cacti, and to look for birds and animals (which were very scarce today except for a coyote running across the road on the way back down).

We got to see some snow, starting at 7,000 feet....Sparky loves snow, as you know....(Don't you dare throw that at me! says Eldo. She didn't.)

The yuccas have started blooming...Those are low spiky bushes and then up comes a tall, tall, blooming spire which will soon blossom into little white or yellow flowerets. Either that, or they have already bloomed, we are not sure.

It was a beautiful afternoon up on the mountain...We are sure we will go back before we leave, maybe in the morning for a different view of the mountain....Then again, maybe we won't. After two VERY rainy days down in the valley, (which is very unusual) Mt. Lemmon got a foot of snow and closed to the roads to all traffic for more than two days, except for the permanent residents on the mountain. We only have one day left to explore before leaving Tucson, so a trip back up the mountain is out.

That's ok, there are many wonderful things to see and do in Tucson...The Pima Air Museum, which we have done in the past, is a great visit and is very close to the RV park. Also, check out the Tucson Desert Museum, it's really cool, too! Er, hot, depending upon what time of year you visit. And don't forget the Saguaro National Park!...Lots of great places to eat, and again, lots of great places to ride on the Loop Trail, Sparky's favorite thing to do....Then there is "The Boneyard", where old planes go to die--3,000 planes come to their final resting place at Davis-Montham Air Force Base. It's the world's largest salvage yard for airplanes where the aircraft are lined up with military precision. It's the perfect climate conditions to store planes that they obviously can't store in hangars for space/cost reasons. They won't rust in the Sonoran Desert, that's for sure! Some are wrapped for permanent storage, and others can be used for spare parts and future activation. It's an amazing sight to see along S. Kolb Rd.

Sparky kept trying to get a photo of the planes from off the road, as tours are no longer offered, but had to settle for a couple from the internet.

We always check out the visitors' centers wherever we go to get literature and info to check out the area. Since we are only here two weeks, we are taking a low key approach this time as far as tourist activities and the hiking thing. They are taking a back seat as we are going to be investing in new RV batteries and maybe having to replace a new front jack in the near future.....

5 mountain ranges surround Tucson

So we got our new batteries installed and are ready to see if the one bothersome jack has improved any. We called on a mobile tech in the park, Urgent Care RV Repair, and Scott Harris came out and installed our batteries for us. Because electricity and very heavy batteries were the order of the day, we preferred to have him do the electrical work and heavy lifting. Those suckers weigh over 60 pounds a piece! We highly recommend him if he is in the Tucson area to help you with any RV needs and repairs. We also highly recommend Merle's Automotive Supply for any car parts needed. Excellent customer service, super friendly (and funny staff), exceptionally kind, caring service and attention for whatever you need.

As far as how much improvement the new batteries will make on the problematic jack, we won't know till our next destination, when we go to put them down. We just know we now have plenty of juice for the slide motors and our automatic electric cord reel and the jacks. We just don't know if there was not enough juice for the jack, or it's gone bad. We head out in two days. We hope the coming year is a healthy, happy one for all of our readers, family and friends. 

We will see you down the road. Next destination--Cottonwood, AZ, near Sedona!

 

Terrific Tucson!

Daily temperatures for two weeks (February): Highs: 82, 76, 51, 60, 70, 76, 73, 66, 58, 53, 63, 71, 73, 74. They are all over the place!

Lows: 43, 35, 36, 41, 43, 45, 40, 32, 30, 35, 40, 44

Site: 3-150, pull through, Voyager RV and Golf Resort, Tucson, AZ, visit #2.

Good T-Mobile mifi, good AT &T hotspots on our iPhones

What a difference between southern Arizona (Yuma) and more north-(Tucson)! Yuma was actually very hot during the daytime the last couple of days we were there--high 80's. Sparky loves the cool nights, Eldo, not so much. As long as the day time temperatures don't get as cold as the nights, he can live with that.

We are glad to be back at the beautiful Voyager RV and Golf park in Tucson that has lots of amenities--beautiful lounging area outside, several pools, terrific workout room, many classes offered, many interest groups offered, crafting rooms and shops--Sparky would use some of them if we were staying a longer time, but we are only staying for two weeks. With our Thousand Trails membership, it's 20.00 a night. Can't beat that!

Tucson is a beautiful city with lots of culture, sculpture, art installations and great restaurants.

The Visitors Center is beautiful, too!

Visitors Center Complex downtown Tucson

There are murals around town....

It just seems like a vibrant city on first inspection. We can't wait to explore it more when we come back next year for a longer stay.

downtown near visitors center

Sparky is back on the Loop Trail...Explored some new sections with different artwork. Sparky went on a different side of town to pick up the Loop Trail and the trail went very close to the town center. More street crossings this time and a more urban feel to the trail.

Much of the art installations this time were centered in a children's park.

Beautiful purple prickly pear cactus along the way....

A glimpse of the beautiful concrete bridge work all over Tucson and nearby surrounding areas....But it's different designs everywhere, this is just one floral theme in a particular area.

Eighteen mile ride today...Saw a lot of wonderful art, got lots of fresh

air, great exercise and experienced cloudless skies. The Chuck Huckleberry Loop, (131 miles total) has a lot of different "looks" to it. There are very urban sections, country sections, remote sections, memory garden sections, (see previous blog post about the memory gardens in the Loop) wash sections, and it gives you a wonderful glimpse into the culture of Tucson. There are three different types of maps you can get about the bike trail, The Loop. They tell you all the details about where the art is, and the important park trailhead, connecting spurs and how to access different portions of the Loop Trail. This is one of the best bike trails Sparky has experienced. Here is a glimpse of one of the more remote sections of the trail, where you have desert on both sides of you, yet a roadway is not that far off to one side, in case you need assistance. The Loop is a two lane, paved, dedicated bike trail, no motorized vehicles allowed.

We drove to Mount Lemmon for a second time to see if there was snow. There was! But not as much as last visit. Mount Lemmon is about 9,000 feet in elevation at the very top, with a ski resort there, too. We love the Windy Point Vista pull out area. So fun to climb across LEVEL boulders and get wonderful views of the valley below. It looks scarier than it is, not scary at all.

We are to get a cold front and a half day of rain here in the valley, bet Mount Lemmon will get a BUNCH of snow!  Forecast for Mount Lemmon is 6-8 inches! (Note: After the cold front passed through and it rained here at the park, Mt. Lemmon was closed to all vehicles the next day except for all wheel drive  and four wheel drive vehicles.) Time for a drive up the mountain again! It's a 25 mile scenic drive and awesome!

And that is our second Tucson visit for now....Sparky's brother Charlie, is coming for a quick visit and we are going to do some awesome hiking and biking, all in a day and a half! And then we leave early this week, heading for Texas. Come back and see us for our last great trail hike in Tucson! Bye for now.......