Cumulative Miles: 5,179
Number of Speeding Tickets: 1
States Visited: 16
Lesson Learned: If you're thinking about visiting Phoenix, don't bother.
After putting off the drive from California to Phoenix, I finally bit the bullet and raced across the desert to meet Robert. It was about a four and a half hour drive and I will admit that for the first time on the trip I found myself bored. The landscape is so brown and unchanging. At some points it was 60 miles between exits and with only an occasional point of interest. I did watch a big dust devil whirl about for a while before dying away, but that was the highlight.
Finally, as I neared Phoenix, I began to see my old friend the Saguaro cactus emerge from the desert. I love these guys. To me, they always look like they're waving to you, even when though they have just one arm...or six. I kinda wanna run up to one and hug it, but given that it's a cactus, I think that's probably not a good idea.
Scottsdale, just outside Phoenix, is home to Frank Lloyd Wright's winter studio, which he called Taliesin West. His original home studio in Wisconsin is simply called Taliesin. He later bought about 200 acres in the Arizona desert that was then wilderness and built a studio/school/resort, which he named for his original studio...just added "west." Wright was a enthusiastic observer of natural forms and he utilized "biomimicry" in some of his architectural designs. In other words, he designed structures, using forms found naturally in plants and trees. Famously, he looked at the internal structure of the Saguaro and Staghorn cacti, which had endoskeletons that gave them strength and air shafts that helped to keep them cool. He mimicked these by using mesh tubing inside of some of his poured concrete columns to make them super strong. I found a dead Saguaro that was on the ground and took the photo (below) of its skeleton. In the picture below, the top right, although now brown, is the outside skin of the Saguaro as it would normally appear, but below that you can see what it looks like with the outer skin torn away. It's like nature's re-bar. Pretty neat.
I did stop by Taliesin West to see if I could tour, but they close at 1 pm in September and I was too late. I've been before, so it wasn't a great loss. I still walked around the grounds a bit and snapped this photo of the entryway. He uses lots of Cherokee Red, one of his favorite colors.
Phoenix was as hot or hotter than Palm Springs, but with none or the charm. Sorry Phoenix, you're just not that interesting. My main mission of the day was to meet Robert at the Phoenix airport and drive with him up to Flagstaff, where we will stay for two nights in a little A-frame cabin about five miles outside of town. I must say we timed things perfectly and he was just exiting the terminal when I cruised in and snatched him up, as smoothly as a baton passing during a skilled, relay race. It was 110 degrees at the airport, but dropped to 73 by the time we hit Flagstaff two hours later. We picked up several thousand feet of altitude along the way, which definitely helped. We stopped at rest stop about halfway to Flagstaff and saw this little guy running around. If I'm not mistaken, it's an actual roadrunner.
We found the cabin fairly easily, after stopping by Safeway for some provisions. It's down a bumpy track essentially in the middle of a field. Nice to be away from city lights. Dinner was a simple affair of comfort food -- rotisserie chicken, salad, and mashed potatoes (thank you Jimmy Dean).
Tomorrow, hopefully some hiking and a nice fancy, restaurant dinner to kick off our joint adventure.
Talk to you more tomorrow!
