…but it was cool. Palms and eucalyptus mixed with pines. A tree-lined downtown area with glassy buildings. Pedestrians everywhere. It was like a small town that stretched for miles.
Diana and I still hadn’t put together a wedding photo album after all this time, so our plan for our two-year anniversary was to get a hotel room, take the laptop, and hash it out. Tucson was just the place we happened to pick. We didn’t finish it, but at least now we have the photos (mostly) selected, we got to escape from the kids, and we got to spend a little time together. Not ritzy, but pretty romantic.
On the way there was an ostrich farm Diana had wanted me to see. It had the whole stupid-tourist-stop atmosphere about it - $5 gets you admission plus a cup of ostrich/deer/emu food, $10 for a giant jeep tour, lame gift shop out front - but it was a fun and unique experience. Their weird bald heads with big, glassy eyes snake up above the fence, you hold out some feed in your hand (or dump it in a dispenser if you’re not so brave), and they snatch it. The signs out front warn “yes, the ostriches bite”, and they do. More often than not my fingers were in their beaks instead of the food. It didn’t really hurt, but you get a little gun shy after the 100th time. (The emus’ beaks were sharper - one took some skin off. Hrmmm, my last tetanus booster was a long time ago…)
It was still the desert, but it was like a whole different region of the country - different people, different attitude, different atmosphere. It was good to escape city limits, I told Diana; good to see and do something new.
Rain the whole way home, which you may know from prior posts is a wonderful thing when you live in a dry region. Grey mountains, fading to white behind the rain, clouds clinging to their tops. Still raining out there now, in fact, and I just opened my window so I could listen to the drops. Wonderful weekend.