March 11 – 18, 2023
Our trip to Tucson was so amazing, this post would entirely too long if I were to put it all into one. As a result, I will be breaking this trip into multiple posts.
Today, I bring you Part Three – Saguaro National Park and the Return Home
Wednesday
Wednesday was, at the beginning, exactly like Monday and Tuesday- I woke up, showered and worked from the lobby until Brandy got up. Once up, I moved back to the room and worked there until she left. She came back fairly early though, but I was on call and needed to finish my day out.
Once I was ready to log off for the day, she took over the makeshift workstation we’d been sharing all week. In the meantime, I started getting our gear ready to go to Saguaro National Park.
Saguaro National Park
Prior to the trip, I’d browsed through AllTrails and found a couple of short and easy hikes I thought we’d try while in town. I’d downloaded them so they’d be available in the case that we lost service. Turns out, that was far from necessary.
Once Brandy was done with her day’s work, she changed and we headed out to the park.
It was a short drive, just under half an hour. We got to the park at around 3:30 and headed in to the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center where we picked up our requisite souvenirs: Brandy with a magnet and a small sticker for her water bottle, and me with a sticker, lapel pin and shotglass.
We left the visitor center just as a light pattering of rain began to fall. It wasn’t a full deluge by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I’d harldy call it ‘rain’. Sprinkling is still too strong of a term for what we experienced.
Anyway, we got in the rental and made our way through the gate, showing our America the Beautiful pass, which means the next National Park or National Monument we visit with that pass, it will be paid for.
We began down the 8 mile Cactus Forest Scenic Loop Drive, a largely one-way paved road that winds through a small portion of the west side of the Rincon Mountain District.
Along the trail are plenty of turnouts onto scenic overlooks, picnic areas and trailheads. We did stop at a couple of overlooks to get some pictures.
Just before the end of the loop is an access road to the Javelina Picnic Area. Along that road was the trailhead for our first hike of the day, the Freeman Homestead Trail.
AllTrails has this trail listed as an easy 1.1 mile loop trail with a mere 108 feet of elevation gain. A point of interest on this trail is the site of the Safford Freeman homestead, where he and his wife Viola settled in the 1930s, applying for a patent under the Homestead Act. The home was adobe so after 90 years of being exposed to the elements, the only indication that there was ever a home there are a couple of cement footings barely visible through the desert sand.
We started down the trail and found it quite manageable. The first tenth of a mile was flat and level and we would have made quicker time over the terrain if we hadn’t stopped for frequent pictures.
After the first tenth of a mile, the loop splits off. We headed down the right fork as indicated by the trail marker and started making a descent down to the former location of the eponymous homestead. As we traveled down, I came to the realization that we’d have to come back up at some point. It wasn’t very steep going down, I imagined it wouldn’t be too bad coming back.
The skies were darkly overcast, threatening rain the entire time. From time to time, the clouds would scatter a bit, allowing some sun to shine through. Thankfully, the rain stayed away as we continued down the trail.
We finally made it to the site of the Freeman Homestead. There was a historical marker at the site describing the significance of the location and how it came into the hands of the National Park Service.
We took a short break at this point, sipping water and preparing to head back up the other side of the loop. We continued on and indeed, the ascent back up to that initial approach was completely manageable by my standards (Brandy, on the other hand, struggled a bit, but she finally made it to the top.)
We reached the fork where we’d strayed off to the right and made it back to the car in due course, finishing the short trail in a little under an hour (43 and a half minutes of actual moving time.) We got into the car and finished the Cactus Forest Scenic Loop before heading out of the park.
Our Attempt at the Mica View Trail
As we exited the park, we decided to try one more easy trail. We made a right on Old Spanish Trail/S. Freeman Road and turned right on Broadway, where at the end, there is a trailhead with four separate trails splintering from it.
As we sat in the parking area for the trailhead, we were surprised to see that we were in the middle of a neighborhood. We sat, looking at the front of a house directly across the street from the trailhead.
The website for the park does have an alert that the park is indeed an “urban park”. The alert goes on to warn that vehicle break-ins have occurred at trailheads around the park and to lock your vehicles and don’t leave valuables in the car. About the only items we had of value with us we were wearing on our backs so we had no worries about that.
We strapped our gear on once more and headed down the Mica View Trail, which AllTrails has listed as an easy 1.4 mile out and back trail with only 49 feet of elevation gain. We unfortunately didn’t make it very far down the trail before Brandy wanted to turn back. Overall, we completed the activity with only three tenths of a mile done in 11 minutes.
Saguaro Corners
We got back into the car and started heading back toward the hotel. We had both worked up vicious appetites so we decided to find a place to stop and eat on the way back. We had passed a place on the corner of Old Spanish Trail and E. Escalante Rd. We decided to stop there if it didn’t look too busy. It wasn’t, so we did.
As we pulled into the parking lot, the skies opened up and it began raining in earnest. We went in and asked if we could sit outside under the covered portion of the patio. We were seated and were pleased to see we were pretty much alone on the patio.
Saguaro Corners Restaurant and Bar offered a wonderful selection of southwest inspired dishes, from nachos and quesadillas to chicken enchiladas and carne asada fries.
We wound up with an order of Wings of Awesomeness (“6 Buffalo chicken wings, beer brined and lightly smoked, on bed of house made ranch potato chips”, though we got fries instead of chips), we each ordered a bowl of Southwest Chicken Corn Chowder, Brandy got the Prime Angus New York Strip steak (“Well trimmed prime steak, mashed potatoes, seasonal vegetables, roasted poblano compound butter”) and I got the Green Chile Carnitas Mac [and cheese].
I have to say, that was probably the best food we had on the entire trip. It was incredibly flavorful, the portions were great and the service was top-notch. It was a perfect end to the day. Once we packed up our leftovers and paid the bill, we headed back to the car and made our way back to the hotel where we promptly fell asleep.
The Return Home
I had taken Thursday and Friday off so when I woke up Thursday morning, I did my best to start packing up what I could. Brandy had a meeting scheduled for 9:30 so we had to leave the travel monitor and stuff out, but everything else was pretty much packed up and ready to go by the time the meeting was to start. My plan was to go to the gas station and fill the car with gas and get ice and water for the cooler while she was on the meeting, but at 9:25, she announced that the meeting had been canceled. We rearranged the plans, packed up the rest of our stuff and headed to the gas station together. After the stop there, we hit the road at 10:00 am, about an hour earlier than we were expecting.
We headed toward Albuquerque, and made it there with little fuss. A couple of slow-downs with road construction but nothing major. We got to Alan’s at around 6:00. We unloaded our necessities and I went with Alan to get Dion’s pizza, always a must when in town. After dinner, Brandy went to lay down (she’d been struggling with alergies pretty much the entire trip) and Alan and I sat chatting and having a couple of drinks before I called it a night at 9:00.
Brandy and I both woke up at about 6:30. After a quick shower and quickly loading up, we jumped on I-25 to head to Christy’s. I knew Albuquerque was expecting snow, but was not expecting the icy, white-out conditions we experienced heading out of town.
We traveled up I-25 much slower than I was hoping we would until about 45 miles south of Raton, where the roads dried up. I was able to up our speed to 85. As we passed by the first exit in Raton, I noticed there was a miles-long line of cars waiting to exit at that offramp on the southbound side of the freeway. Brandy surmised the road must be closed behind us. Seemed logical.
We continued on, encountering more snow just as we got into Colorado. Luckily, once we passed the state line, we only had a little way to go before we got off the freeway. We did so in Walsenburg. We tried to go to the Love’s truck stop just off the freeway but it was PACKED. As many times as we’ve been to that truck stop, I’ve never even seen a quarter of the traffic we saw there that day. We assumed that it was due, once again, to a freeway closure south of our location.
We skipped the truck stop and found ourselves at Carl’s Jr. for a bite before heading to Christy’s, arriving at just about 12:30. We sat and ate, Brandy and Christy had a quick catch-up and we shortly left, only spending about an hour there. We headed off east through Colorado, across the Kansas state line and into the small town of Oakley.
We had stayed in Oakley before on our last trip to Albuquerque and Walsenburg. That time we stayed at a Sleep Inn & Suites on that trip, which was fine, typical corporate hotel at over $100 a night.
This time, Brandy booked us a room at the Annie Oakley Motel, deeper in the heart of town.
We pulled in and Brandy ran in to check us in. We wound up being 2 doors down from the office, so we didn’t have to go far.
It was a quaint little place, much better than the Quality Inn in Tucson, for sure, and a lot cheaper than the room we got in Oakley on that last trip. We got a double-queen room, each of us getting a whole queen to ourselves. The room had a large TV, a tub for Brandy, and all the classic motel amenities.
We took in our couple of bags that we needed and looked for nearby dining options. We settled on The Bluff, a little hole in the wall joint that clearly caters to truckers judging by the size of their parking lot. The building itself sits WAAAAY back off the road leaving room for plenty of semis to park.
I called in our order and 15 minutes later, made the 5 minute drive to the joint. I got back to the motel and we ate, I got the chicken fried steak and Brandy got the classic sirloin steak.
It wasn’t long before we were both fast asleep and ready to make the last leg of the trip on Saturday.
We were on the road before 7:30 and were home right around 3:30, with nothing of note in between. A couple of stops for gas, pee breaks, that was about it.
Conclusion
This trip was absolutely amazing. We hit a ton of spots that really lit my fire, including the Blue Swallow Motel, Tombstone, and Saguaro National Park, on top of seeing my friend again, and being able to work pretty much the whole time we were in Arizona.
This trip was definitely more for me than it was for Brandy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Brandy enjoyed the things we did too, but would not have sought them out if not for me.
In addition to thoroughly enjoying myself on the trip, it also rekindled my wanderlust. I have more travels coming in less than a month and I absolutely cannot wait for that!
In the meantime, please enjoy the pictures from our adventures at Saguaro National Park in my Photo Diary.
In going back to my practice of ending my posts with a quote, I will leave you with this one by a Bruce Chitin, who doesn’t have a great presence on the internet, but he said:
The real home of man is not his house but the road. Life itself is a travel that has to be done by foot.
-Bruce Chitin
I’m glad to have been back on the road, and to have some amazing conversations with Brandy about the future of our travels.
Until next time though, as always, thank you for stopping by. I appreciate you.
-Phil
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