We left for Arizona early on a Monday morning.  It was going to be about a 5 hour drive to get to our centrally located hotel just outside of Phoenix.  We thoroughly enjoyed the scenery on the way out.  Even if we didn’t visit anyone, the trip alone was worth the drive.  We started out leaving San Diego and we had vegetation like this

City of San Diego

Ya know, your normal palm trees and yucca plants.  A little further down the road we ran into the Border Patrol check

Border Patrol Check

They had these on both sides of the highway.  The one coming back into San Diego was a little more extravagant but less show of guns.  At the one on the road traveling East, the guys had guns slung over their shoulders but they just wanted to know if we were US citizens.  I couldn’t hear the guy very well and kept saying “what?”, “what”, he finally just waved us thru.  I guess we weren’t suspicious enough to search.  At the one pictured above, they just had side arms, but a lot more men milling about.  Luckily we had no fruits or vegetables to declare and we weren’t hiding any illegals in our car.  When we drove up to this one, they saw a couple of old people in a rental and waved us thru.  I’m glad they didn’t stop and search us, they would have found the apple in my purse and we might have been thrown in jail!  Hopefully Smokie would have been able to scrape enough money together to bail us out.

We continued our journey east after the border patrols.  We could even see the border fence as we traveled down the road

Real Fence

Garmin version of the border fence, see the black line?

Then the scenery turned to rocks

More Rocks

Rocks

And I mean HUGE rocks, some as big a bus.  See the telephone pole in the picture?  That gives you some idea of the size of these rocks.  Really cool!  We made sure we didn’t scream or throw things out the window as we passed the rocks so we didn’t cause a rock slide.

As we were traveling thru the rocks we started heading up the mountain

Pull over buddy, I’m trying to pass

It is so steep that they have truck run offs on the way down and places you can pull over and put water in your radiator if you start to overheat on the way up

Over heating? No problem!

That is the first time I have ever seen that, but I must admit, with the temperatures in the 100’s I’m sure it is a handy thing to have along the side of the road.

Then we ran into windmills.  There were a ton of them, and big!

Yowzer!

They also did a lot of solar power along that route

Solar

Which is a good idea considering the sun shines all the time.  One thing we couldn’t figure out was all the grass they seemed to be growing

Which the more we drove we figured out they weren’t growing grass for grass purposes but for hay!  We thought it was kind of a weird crop to be growing in California as it is always in a drought situation.  You’d think growing the grass, just to let it dry out would take a lot of water.  There were a ton of hay farms and big bails of hay all over the place on that stretch of highway

Hay sitting out

Hay under the tarp

They must have a bunch of hungry horses somewhere around there :).  Maybe the rams eat all the hay

Ram crossing

When was the last time you saw a sign like this?

As we were getting closer to Phoenix, we began seeing a lot of these type of cactus

Saguaro Cactus

It’s hard to take good picture out the window while you’re traveling at 70 MPH 🙂

Here is a better picture

These cactus will not grow their side arms till they are 75 to 100 years old.  They can live for over 150 years and grow to over 40 feet, wow!  They even have flowers that bloom from April to June and produce a very tastiee fruit after the flowers bloom in June.  I liked these cactus the best but I know Smokie would have preferred this one

Kitty Cactus

We did see some kind of farming like this

What are they growing?

Not sure what they are growing under those rows.  Can’t really tell if this is plastic or what over the dirt.  Any ideas?

Once we got to Phoenix and were getting ready to leave to visit our friends, there were all these storm warnings over the TV.  They called the storm a Monsoon.  That is where a wall of dust and sand come moving thru the area.  Apparently if it rains at the same time it comes down like mud.  We watched the radar and figured we could make it past the storm before it hit.  We got on the highway and the winds were whippin, I guess we figured wrong.  Stuff was flying all over the place.  There were white balls hitting our car, I first thought it was hail, but at over 100 degrees, I know that wasn’t it.  The sand and dirt got so bad we couldn’t see (we as in Gary, I always make him drive when the driving part is crappy 🙂 ) we pulled off the highway and waited for it to pass.  This is what the pool at the hotel looked like that night when we got back

Dirty Pool

See all that crap floating and sitting on the bottom.  Man, I bet that is a pain if you have a pool in your yard.  Needless to say, we didn’t use that pool after that ;).

We enjoyed our 4 days trip to Arizona, enjoyed seeing our friends and their lovely homes.  We were able to visit Sun City and Sun Lakes.  Both 55+ communities.  Very nice places with plenty to do and loads of activities to keep you busy.  But….not much water around so I don’t think we’ll be settling there anytime soon.  And those comments about “but it is dry heat”, ya sure but at 108 degrees, it is still HOT!  Maybe we’ll make it back for a visit some other time, hopefully not in the summer :).