Arizona! Magical land of sun, sage, sand, saguaro and scorpions!
Yet in my 12 years in Southern California I’d never set foot in the Grand Canyon State. That all changed the week before Memorial Day.
Undeterred by rising gas prices and rising Arizona temperatures, I filled up my tank, loaded up with CDs and set off to see friends in Tempe.
Some observations from the road:
- Billboard spotted along the 10 Freeway: “Banning: We Have What You Need.” What I needed was a freeway out of Banning, and Banning delivered.
- Deep into eastern Riverside County, I grew sleepy. Possible culprits: 1) Mile after mile of unchanging desert, or 2) “The Very Best of Jackson Browne.”
- Gram Parsons made for great desert driving music, though. And traveling solo amid the arid landscape, rocky hills and open sky was unexpectedly relaxing.
- At the McDonald’s in Blythe, a single cheeseburger was $1.29, while a double cheeseburger was $1. Hmm.
- Across the Arizona border in Tonopah, an exit in the middle of nowhere is labeled “411th Ave.” Numbered streets don’t even go that high in Manhattan.
- My friends told me to exit on Baseline Road. I had to stop myself from exiting when I saw a sign for 16th Street.
- Not only does the 10 Freeway go through Tempe, so does the 60 Freeway. As one Tempe friend put it: “You’re just up the street.”
- In Arizona, instead of palm trees at the entrance to every shopping center, they have a cluster of cactus, the iconic saguaro kind with the upraised arms. Cool.
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s Scottsdale home, studio and school, Taliesin West, made for a fun tour.
- Wright, of course, is America’s best-known architect. One of his sons, John Lloyd Wright, has a different legacy: He invented Lincoln Logs.
- Arizona is home to a roadway named Carefree Highway, the subject of a Gordon Lightfoot song, “Carefree Highway.”
- You were expecting “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?
- The Superstition Mountains inspired the name of numerous local fixtures. A favorite: the eerily named Superstition Office Plaza.
- P.F. Chang’s China Bistro is based in that hotbed of Asian culture, Scottsdale.
- A Jeep tour of Sedona’s canyon is well worth doing.
- Speaking of canyons: At last, I can say I saw the Grand Canyon. It lives up to its adjective. Yes, it’s basically an enormous ditch. But if anything in this life is grand, it’s that canyon.
- From the south rim, I thought the north rim, five miles across the vast canyon, looked fake, like a painted backdrop. My colleague Mike Brossart assures me that from the north rim, the south rim also looks like a painted backdrop. Maybe the whole thing’s done with mirrors.
- Not far from the Grand Canyon is Flintstone Village, a classic roadside attraction — the less charitable would call it a tourist trap –built to resemble Bedrock. You pay $5 and wander amid full-size replicas of Fred and Wilma’s home, their pet Dino, a post office, a jail, etc.
- You can also slide down the Dino Slide, the metal of which might burn your fingers on a hot day, he wrote bitterly.
- Frankly, Flintstone Village is lonely, depressing and half-derelict. But then, what do you expect? It’s, like, a million years old!
- I knew I wasn’t in California anymore when, on my last night in Arizona, I saw this sign on the greeter’s station in a pleasant Tempe coffee shop: “No Firearms Allowed.”
- Perhaps, as with smoking and nonsmoking sections, the coffee shop greeter should simply ask customers cheerfully, “Firearms or no firearms?”
- After filling up at a Circle K in Tempe — only in these times would $3.03 per gallon seem like a bargain — I headed for home.
- Anxiety-producing Riverside County freeway sign: “State Prison Next Exit. Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.”
- In a brilliant planning move, that same exit has a rest stop. It was full of people eyeing each other warily.
- I stopped at the General Patton Museum in Chiriaco and at the Cabazon dinosaurs, which seem to have been taken over by the intelligent design crowd. They’re pushing the idea that humans and dinosaurs existed in the same era.
- Did they do their research at Flintstone Village?
David Allen, the modern Stone Age columnist, writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail d_allen@dailybulletin.com, call (909) 483-9339 or write 2041 E. Fourth St., Ontario 91764.
