Back and forth

We got to Phoenix at around 3 on Sunday (October 25th), reveling in the thought that we wouldn't need to sleep in all of our clothes again in the near future, and met up with my college friends Brad and Jen at their house in Mesa. We got caught up after nearly 9 years since the last time I was there, I allowed myself to be persuaded to play Candyland with Brad and Rhiannon, their 5-year-old daughter, and there was dinner for everyone and margaritas for most of us. It was really a nice way to be welcomed back into civilization and we spent a very pleasant evening getting through all our piled-up emails and showing William old photos from college.

On Monday, we ran around almost all morning doing errands and stocking up for our next round of camping. Driving around the Mesa area was...tedious. It reminded us of California (especially Los Angeles) since it seems to take forever to get anywhere and, generally, every intersection looked exactly like the last one. The drivers on the highway weren't terribly polite, either. We had lunch at Serrano's (which I highly recommend) and made a few feeble attempts that afternoon to organize all the stuff that needed washing and/or repacking after the last round of camping, but it didn't go very far. That night, we ventured out to play tunes with someone we had never met, and here's how we got there: Pat (who we stayed with in early October) in Jamestown, CO knows Sharon in Tucson, AZ who knows Sven who lives in Phoenix. We contacted Sven, he had planned to have a few people over that night but as it turned out we were the only ones who could make it. Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time hanging out with him for a few hours.

On Tuesday...we made the decision to go back to Flagstaff for a couple of days. On the way out of Phoenix we stopped at the Desert Botanical Gardens, which caused me to spend several hours trying to figure out exactly how I would go about building a cactus garden in the Pacific Northwest. We got to Flagstaff around sunset and by the time we got to dinner (Flagstaff Brewing Company, of course - along with some fine beer, they have excellent black bean burgers) it was SNOWING. That was also the night that my computer's hard drive stopped working. Sigh...

Wednesday started with even more snow. And, William woke up with what was either an overly enthusiastic cold or a mild flu. I went out for a few hours: visited Starlight Books, which had a book on the photographer Imogen Cunningham, and tried out the coffee at Flagstaff Coffee Company, which features coffee from our old hangout Barefoot in Santa Clara, CA. I got lunch for both of us at Mountain Oasis and decided that I had had enough of the cold and snow for the day. We did both venture out that night for dinner at the appropriately named Little Thai Kitchen and then stopped by the outdoor store in the same shopping center, where we replaced our pecked-up water container and I finally got around to buying a hat like all the cool kids are wearing (it looks something like this - different colors though).

And, then it was Thursday. It stopped snowing, the sun came out, we found a queen-sized air mattress that fit the pump we had bought for the first mattress, and the weather forecast said that the lows in Joshua Tree National Park (the next stop) would only get down to the 40s. We set off into the Mojave desert for another 5 days of camping and realized that I-40 mostly parallels old Route 66 - yet another idea for a future road trip.