Armchair Adventures: Arizona’s Novel Destinations

“Novel destinations” have enhanced our travels through north central Arizona. Using the recommendations from so many of you, we’ve started some armchair explorations of Arizona. Today I’ll tell you about a few of them as we head out to north eastern Arizona. . .

   . . . land of the Navajo, Hopi, and Hualapai Indian Reservations.


Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal police – a character created by award-winning writer, Tony Hillerman introduced us to the Reservation.  

With the help of the delightful owner, I selected a couple of used paperbacks from a towering stack of Hillerman’s books on display at Bent River Books and Music, 1010 N. Main Street  in Cottonwood, a small town not far from Sedona. 


Thankfully, Hillerman’s  got more than 35 years of writing under his belt and a few dozen more adventures waiting for us now that we’ve discovered this New Mexico author.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that in addition to never having read Hillerman, we’d also not experienced  -- until now --the writing of Louis L’Amour, the author of some 89 novels set in America’s frontier – perhaps his best known being the Hopalong Cassidy series. (Photo is from his website which can be accessed by clicking his name above.)


I chose at random, The Haunted Mesa, from a bookstore at the Phoenix airport. The story based on the disappearance of the Anasazi, or 'ancient enemy’ as the Navajo called them – it is so engrossing that I can barely put it down.  And I’ll certainly be reading more of his books – soon.

I must thank a clerk at Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Scottsdale for suggesting Phoenix Noir, a collection of short stories by contemporary authors set in or near Phoenix. It is not a book I would have purchased had it not been recommended – it is dark.  The stories aren’t those that appear in tourist publications, yet it was one of the best books I’ve read this year because it gave me a look at the ‘other side’ of the city. I read them in short doses and let each story percolate before moving on to the next.



Phoenix Noir is part of a series of books published by Akashic Books; all are noir (dark) short stories and the dozens of cities in which they are set stretch across the globe from Seattle to Barcelona.

This post kicks off a new monthly feature at TravelnWrite – our Armchair Adventures. They require you pack nothing more than a book to your favorite chair.  If you have a ‘novel destination’ to be included in future posts, send it our way.

TPThursday: A Sonoran Spring

The temperature hovers at 100-degrees, the sky is a cloudless blue.  We’ve been in Arizona for just a bit more than two weeks; we now understand its most apt nickname of “Arid Zona”.

A highlight of our time here  has been discovering the beauty of a Sonoran Spring:
 

The local newspaper, The Arizona Republic,  has a daily column that features a historical highpoint of the date, a chuckle for the day and also a prayer.  Today’s prayer couldn’t have been more appropriate for this post: “Lord, We thank you for the beauty that surrounds us. Amen.”



This barrel cactus is one of our favorites.



These delicate blooms adorned for several days the thorniest of cacti outside our unit at the Four Seasons Scottsdale.



It doesn’t require any strenuous hikes into the desert to find these beauties, most of the photos were taken either along roadsides outside Scottsdale or near parking lots.



Next week’s posts will include a garden tour with the Landscape Supervisor for the Four Seasons Scottsdale and some road trips in north central “Arid Zona”.  Today is TPThursday so head over to Budget Travelers Sandbox for other shots from around the world.

High Plains Drifters, Mad Dogs and Englishmen

June 2012 arrived Friday in Phoenix/Scottsdale with a sizzle:  113-degrees was the prediction ~ it felt hotter. Like a sucker-punch-to-the-stomach-hot.

We like hot, dry climates. And that is good, because that’s what we’ve had since arriving in the Valley of the Sun.

Fellow travel blogger, Dick Jordan, (whose Tales Told From the Road is worth a visit) reminded us that there’s a reason for the saying, “Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen travel to ‘Arid Zona’ between baseball’s spring training camps and Thanksgiving” and that reason is the weather.

We arrived during a ‘cold spell’ by locals’ standards. It was 89-degrees. The heat kept rising until Friday and is now back to a more comfortable ‘hovering at 100 or so degrees’.

Don’t be put off by the weather report though, because mornings and late afternoons are great for poolside lazing.

We are loving “Arid Zona” and if you haven’t yet planned a summer getaway give some thought to heading to America’s Southwest. Hotels are offering some great deals (and rooms are air conditioned). Those resorts, like the Four Seasons Scottsdale where we are this week, are offering some great deals in their spas – also air-conditioned paradises. (That’s a photo of the Four Seasons pool with Pinnacle Peak in the background.)

If that isn’t enough to bring you here, then let me tell you there is no better reason to sip a margarita than to cool yourself after a day in the sun.  We’ve been on a quest for the perfect one since arriving in the state – we’ll tell you where to find ‘em in a future post.

(These tasty treats were consumed in Prescott, AZ right after we hit town.)

Right now, I’m headin’ off to quench my thirst. . .again!

TPThursday: Mascota Mexico Magic

While we are traveling through Arizona this week, we are taking you back for a final look at Mascota, Mexico's magic with some of the photos we took earlier this month in this small town in the Sierra Madres.



The church towers over the town’s square, its bells call out the time and bring the faithful to prayer.  Off to one side of the church  there is the shrine shown below of Father Jose Maria Robles Hurtado, a Catholic priest who was executed on June 25, 1927 as part of the conflict between the church and the Mexican government. He was beatified in 1992 and canonized in 2000 by Pope John Paul.  He is considered a son of this small town.



The Robles family runs one of our favorite hangouts in town, the Napoles Bakery and Café, a few blocks from the church. Fr. Jose was a member of this family and his photo, articles about him and tributes have been on display in the bakery since the first time we visited 10 years ago.



We made repeated trips to this sweet treat only a couple blocks from our hotel. . .afternoon coffee, dinner that night and breakfast before we left.  There is a warmth about their hospitality that we’ve found irresistible.  (Not to mention good food and drink!)



We watched afternoon turn into evening from a park bench in the zocalo, the town square.  Actually we watched the man high in that church’s tower pulling the ropes to ring the bells and announce the start of the evening’s service. . .these days the Catholic Church is alive and well here.



Just a few blocks from the square are the remains of the Templo de la Preciosa Sangre (Church of the Holy Blood).  This 19th Century church would have been enormous – it simply was never finished.



That's it for Mascota. If you make it to Puerto Vallarta give yourself a couple of extra days and head to the hills.  For now it is Travel Photo Thursday and time to check out the photos on display at Budget Travelers Sandbox.







pT

High Plains Drifters and Sherman our Tank

There is something about us and rental cars in Arizona. . .

Remember Ol’ Orange from last spring? We felt as if we were in a Sunkist citrus commercial as we buzzed through the Valley of the Sun in a burnt navel orange.
 
Then there was that little tin tuna can we drove for a week last fall – the one that cost us $600 because we missed the small print about a one-way drop charge.

So, it should be no surprise when I introduce you to Sherman, (short for Sherman the Tank) our wheels for this spring’s Arizona road trip:




Sherman, a Mercury Marquis, is a big ol’ boy. So big that I sit on towels that I take from the room so that I can see out the front. . .that’s one big ol’ stretch of hood you might notice.  Joel, who operates this tank, has compared some maneuvers to how it might be steering a cruise ship.

We got a great rate on a small compact car for our 16 days here. Advantage price: $385. But they didn’t have a compact for us and after we turned down their offers to pay a bit more for a bigger car, they simply told us they were upgrading us at no charge. End result? Sherman.

The travel tip with this story is: sometimes bigger isn’t better even if it is free.

On the flip side: if for some reason we needed a place to sleep, we could certainly stretch out in our car. 

Sherman's gotten us to some mighty nice places this last week and I’ll be telling you more about them later on.  Right now I have to figure out what that little red light on the dashboard that came on this morning might mean. . .

Bucerias, Mexico: Back to our Future

There was a time when Bucerias, Mexico, a small fishing village north of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s west coast was our future. Now, it's a sizeable segment of our past. Earlier this month we revisited that past.

Seven years ago we sold our last property there, The Dolce Vitas, and filed Mexico away in our history book.

(Unlike our Casa de la Playa below, the DV’s still stand – next to them these days is a restaurant offering live music and dancing.) 

Back to our Future


In 1991 the laid-back fishing village we selected as the site of our second home --our heads filled with all the giddy future plans that go with such investments – there were maybe six restaurants.  Accommodations included a couple of Mexican-owned and operated low-end  hotels, a condo building or two, and a few privately-owned homes, such as ours, that served as vacation rentals.

The town’s landmark were the stalls of oyster vendors that lined the two-lane Highway 200 that bisected it.

From our U.S. home we brought supplies – sheets, towels, kitchen supplies –to the south-of-the-border house (in oversized suitcases; thankfully, before baggage fees came to be).

Today:  Tourism and Touts; Big Boxes and Banks

 Bucerias  is now a part of the tourist-zoned, Riviera Nayarit.  And tourism has come to town! (Along with the multitudes of over-zealous trinket touts and timeshare sales people that seem to come with Mexican tourism.) 

The gauntlet of trinket touts lines every street leading into town from the old footbridge over the dry, dusty arroyo. The constant calls:  “Hey Lady, come look!” “Hey, how long you here?” “Good prices, almost free!”  made us want to shout: “Enough already!”



Oyster vendors? We saw one  lone table  stacked with oysters to the side of  a ‘lateral’.

The laterals, those local access roads to the side of the highway, have been enlarged to two lanes each direction as has the highway itself, making the road through town an eight-lane super structure with a palm-tree lined median strip.









Accommodations abound. This hotel sits across from the fish restaurants that still line the beach in the town’s el centro.
High rise condo buildings with unit price tags starting at $300,000US, are sprouting like beach grass all over town. The rental site, Vacation Rental By Owner, lists 129 accommodations – unlike the half dozen listed when we owned there.

Household supplies are readily available from Costco, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, in Puerto Vallarta, and the Mexican chain, Mega in Bucerias.  Each store is stocked with ATM’s.  Bucerias  has banks now as well.

Bucerias isn’t the town it once was, but we aren’t the same either. As we all know sometimes change isn’t always bad.  Have you revisited your future lately?  If so, what changes have you found?

TPThursday: Reality Travel–in Mexico

Our favorite trips are those to places that are off the tourist map; places like Mascota, Mexico.   They are places that fascinate just by their very being. Join us on a walk through this town up in the Sierra Madre Occidentals, the mountains that are a backdrop to Puerto Vallarta.



Mascota, is a municipal seat and has regular bus service from Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara. Many of them are old but colorful.  The road from Puerto Vallarta is a paved, two-lane highway.



It’s a town in the heart of agricultural lands, where cowboys ride their horses into town for real. I decided it felt way too touristy to photograph them as they approached so I took the coward's way and waited until they passed.



It was as normal here to see a load of hay stacked high in the back of a pick-up truck, as it was to see the truck’s bed loaded with children and adult family members coming into town from the ranch.




It’s the kind of place that tourists would likely criticize for having ‘nothing to see’ but travelers wouldn’t be able to resist its charms.



These photos are reminders that every town we visit has a story.  I’ll show you some of the treasures we found here next week.


For now w it is Travel Photo Thursday so drop by Nancie’s Budget Travelers Sandbox for photos of other interesting places in this big old world of our.

High Plains Drifters on the Road Again

The High Plains Drifters, our other nom de blog, will soon be living for a couple of weeks in our hot, dry timeshare world -  Arizona’s desert. 

We’ve got plans to see a number of long time friends from the Northwest (who have also migrated south seeking sun) as well as some local folks we’ve met in the blogosphere: Jackie Dishner author of the guidebook, Backroads and Byways of Arizona, and publisher of the blog, Bike with Jackie (I love that title!) and David and Carol Porter, known  as The Roaming Boomers.  (Take a minute and check out those blogs by clicking the blue links.)

Before we settle in to our Scottsdale ‘home-away-from- home’ life, we’ll be traveling some of the back roads and byways,with stops in Prescott and Jerome in the north central part of the state.
 
We’ll also be taking a four-hour tour aboard the vintage train, the Verde Canyon Railroad, travelin’ 12 miles an hour through the Verde Canyon, once the home of the Sinagua Indians.

Have any recommendations for us in the Scottsdale/Phoenix area? Or north central Arizona?  How about recommendations for books set in Arizona?