R&R in Tucson
Ah, Tucson. Long have we waited for this stop. We had much to look forward to here.
Friends - some old friends we knew from Portland generously offered to receive and hold packages for us about a month ago. We have a literal truckload of goodies waiting for us! If you want to endear yourself to a full-time RV family, receiving packages is a sure path to their heart. Plus we enjoy our their' company :) Friends on the road are a rare treasure! It gets lonely out here.
Family - my parents planned a trip to Tucson and Phoenix some months ago, before we even hit the road. There looked to be a chance that we'd cross paths down here and it's actually worked out. So our first weeks here will have family visits as well!
Reset - You really feel the difference in city size as you travel between wild places, towns, and cities. Certain errands and activities are just so much easier in a city. We've been in small towns and wild places for weeks, and now - fancy grocery stores! Well-equipped laundromats! Bike shops! The wait is over!
Some highlights of our busy, beautiful first two weeks here:
Catalina State Park is just spectacular. It's nestled into the foothills NE of Oro Valley, 10 minutes north of Tucson proper. Yet it feels much further away, isolated into the desert with mountain views. You can fall out your door and land right on beautiful mountain bike trails leading all over the hills and up to the mountains. The RV sites are spacious and while they don't have wastewater hookups (necessitating what one neighbor called the "Catalina shuffle" down to the dump station) they're laid out nicely and well, there's no bad view from in here. There's a 14-day stay limit for good reason, nobody would leave otherwise.
My parents, along with one of my aunts and her husband, rented a huge house just 10 minutes down the highway from us, so we got to see them several times to play cards, bake cookies, and one night have a campfire (sadly, no wood fires at Catalina. It turns out deserts have wildfires too). Rainy, cold weather for much of our stay kept us inside for these visits, which isn't ideal but it's hard to complain when I'm seeing actual family so far from home.
The medical challenges I've been dealing with since Bakersfield are finally being diagnosed by a specialist. I'll say one thing for the southwest, all those retired folks and their medical needs make for easy looking if you need a specialist for something. It's been a relief to talk to someone who knows these issues well. But… I am going back on antibiotics for another 10 days. :-/ They seem to be working well, I have a follow up next week and we'll go from there. I'm very reluctant to leave Tucson without a game plan for this. Heading into the unknown is scary enough without health drama. Take care of yourselves, kids!
Last summer we (and seemingly everybody else in the USA) needed some new bicycles. The kids had both outgrown theirs, and Kristin's beautiful green mixte was too heavy and fragile to take on the road. But there was a nationwide (global?) bike shortage due to COVID, so no bikes were available for less than $1000. At all. Not from any maker, not on the used market, nothing. So we left Portland with 3 bikes, 2 of which didn't really fit their owners, with the goal of getting new ones on the road somewhere. Sadly, the bike shortage really hasn't ended 9 months on, though it has loosened up a tiny bit. We couldn't find much used, nor did we have time and resources to go looking at Craigslist bikes, so we found one maker online that had new bikes in stock and got one each for for Luke and Kristin, and fixed up Luke's bike to hand down to Audrey. We found a bike shop down the road that had short service lead times, and went there several times to get Luke's old bike tuned up, Kristin's bike assembled, and mine cleaned and tuned after enduring the Horrible Dust in Winterhaven. In the end all 4 of us got rides-like-new bikes and couldn't be happier. We really didn't get to ride them enough in this incredible park (and we rode a lot!). But they'll last us years and many miles to come.
My parents generously offered to take the kids on a field trip and give us some time off, which we happily accepted. So the kids got to see Biosphere 2 which sounded really cool, and Kristin and I enjoyed that rarest of fulltiming family treats: alone time. We went on an excellent bike ride, talked one-on-one, and it was lovely. Near the end of our time together, after we made it back to the RV, we found to our dismay that our main graywater tank was full! So we had to do an unplanned Catalina shuffle and pack up the rig for driving it down to the dump station at the park entrance. So that was how we spent the last hour of our alone time!
Tucson has plenty of local tourist activities, but the one that stood out to us was horses. Horses are apparently huge in Tucson - maybe central AZ as a whole - with lots of ranches, horse training centers, and stables. So we figured we should try a horse riding excursion. The kids have never done one, and Kristin and I haven't been in years. We wanted to be conservative with our approach thought, who knows if the kids would actually like it? So we set up a 30-minute ride at a place down the road, and it was a blast! The wrangler was a perfect gentleman, patient and funny, and the horses were perfectly trained. Next time we get to go riding, we'll make a longer appointment!
Catalina State Park is so wonderful that we would stay 3 weeks without hesitation, but I guess so would everybody else - stays are limited to 14 days here. (Plus they're booked solid anyway, it's high season here.) We need to stay another week so I can finish my medical followups, so we have to change parks. Unfortunately, due to it being high season, spaces are kind of scarce. Many parks here are age restricted to 55+ which... I don't understand and frankly resent. Maybe when I'm that age I'll appreciate it. So we're heading to the SW corner of town to stay at Casino Del Sol, where we'll have full hookups. It's not like, a nice part of town, or even a nice RV park there at the casino, but it keeps us in the city as long as we need. We'll make the most of it as best we can, and carry thankful memories of this beautiful spot.
