Yes, I *would* like some cheese with my whine.

My lips feel like the bark of this dead tree.
There is not enough ChapStick
in the world
to make me live in Arizona.

This isn't a real post because:

A: it is so hot that my brain hurts and I can't bear to look up the cool things I've seen on the Google right now. (Trees with green trunks, a unicorn chicken, and some alien crop circles, for example.)

B: it's so windy that gritty dust is getting everywhere, especially this keyboard and I am not liking to touch it. (yes, English is my first language, thanks for asking.

4: I am trying to figure out how to get out of acknowledging people that are nice to me by giving me awards. (I'm squinting at you Vanessa and Robyn.)

7b: it is so hot.

We are getting loaded in Superior, Arizona at a place that makes calcium something or other and we aren't allowed to idle to run the a/c and our little a/c is broken and the sun is the devil. The devil. And you have to wear a hard hat to go to the bathroom.

And, I had to take Jas on a walk because she refuses to cross her legs. Did you know that in Boxer math, 10 minutes in 100 degree weather equals 3 bowls of water and 2 hours of heavy breathing? She's such a wuss. I only drank 1 bowl.

A Cotton-Pickin Good Blog

As we Tumbleweeds drive along America's highways and byways, we take notice of  the crops.  In middle America it's mainly corn, soy, and wheat.  Idaho has potatoes and beets.  Michigan and Ohio have fruit trees.  New Jersey has angry people.  California has everything in the produce department.

When I think of cotton, I think of the South.  Sweet iced-tea, hushpuppies, and Scarlett O'Hara.  Last week we found cotton in the desert.  Acres and acres of it behind a truck stop near Tuscon, Arizona.

What surprised me even more than finding cotton among the cactus, were the plants themselves.  I have only ever seen cotton from a distance, usually after the "cotton" part of the plant has already exploded from the boll.

These were young plants, I guess and the bolls were hard and green; they looked and felt like limes.  We cut one open and the fiber in it was hard-packed, dense, and sectioned just like a lime.

Cotton™: the doppelgänger of our limes.

Isn't that crazy how much it looks like a lime?  Probably doesn't taste the same in a margarita though!

Cotton and/or Arizona Facts:

* The top crop commodities in Arizona are lettuce, cotton, and hay.

* Arizona grows enough cotton each year to make at least one pair of jeans for every person in America.

* The boll weevil, a beetle that feeds on cotton plants, devastated harvests in the early 1900's but also forced farmers to diversify their crops, ultimately improving their lives.  Proving the old adage that we should fear no weevil.

* US paper money is made of 75% cotton and 25% linen and 90% owned by China.

* The ad campaign, "Cotton™: The fabric of our lives", has been around for 41 years and was the first commodity to be branded.  "Pork: The other white meat" came years later, but they are really missing the boat with crude oil.  Hello?!  Black gold, Texas Tea; even The Beverly Hillbillies had better names for it.

These cotton bales were in Texas.
They are about the size of our trailer

Up close, it looks like the bales are made of
teddy-bear innards.  

 The best 4 minutes and 43 seconds you'll hear today.

NASA, Copper and Dead Tumbleweeds

The Tumbleweeds are in the dust bowl of the southwest. There cannot be any dirt left between Arizona and New Mexico because it's all in our truck, my ears and the computer keyboard.

Why does the tumbleweed cross the road?

We couldn't see ten feet in front of us in some places, it was like a dust blizzard. It was so windy that hordes of tumbleweeds were being forced from their hiding places and swept across the road in front of us without warning. We may have killed one. Or twenty. If we are Tumbleweeds and we killed a tumbleweed is it homicide? Tumbleweedacide? Herbicide??

                                                  **News Flash**

We did not get murderlized or kidnapped on the Mexican border. Nothing exciting ever happens to us! We made it in and out of Nogales without so much as a dirty look.

Copper mine tailings south of Tucson.
I took this picture on I-19 from
the truck window.

Arizona Facts:

*Arizona is the top copper producer in the US.

*The star in the middle of the Arizona state flag is copper in honor of all that, well, copper.

*I-19 in Arizona goes from Tucson to Nogales at the Mexican border and uses the metric system on their signs. It's only a 63 mile (or 4,127 kilometer) stretch of road and the rest of the interstates in Arizona don't do this. Who says we aren't welcoming to immigrants?

*Arizona does not believe in Daylight Savings Time (making the time-zone challenged Tumbleweeds very confused when we have an appointment in this state).

*We saw a car dealership in Phoenix with a sign that read:

Buckle up! Make it harder for aliens to abduct you.

NASA took this picture of an open-pit copper
mine in southeast Arizona. From space.
Show offs.

<<  See the copper star? The dirt we saw around the copper mine tailings was kind of turquoise-ish, like the Statue of Liberty. I'm sure there's some science behind that, but I'm kind of bored with Arizona now and my internet is spotty so no more facts for you!

Picture of mineral spirits and aluminum paint in
a bucket. Taken while standing up.
Take that NASA.

High Deserts and Hi Jolly

Give me a hug you spiky devil!

The Tumbleweeds have broken new ground, forged a new path, gone where no man has gone before...not really, but I did hug a cactus.


We don't often get off the interstate. Sadly, back roads tend not to be the shortest route. The drive north out of Flagstaff, AZ on US 89 is one of the most beautiful we have driven. We were just east of that big, wondrous hole, the Grand Canyon. It was gorgeous high desert country, the colors all muted and wind washed. Those fabulous saguaro cactus that you thought only existed in Roadrunner cartoons, dirt in every color of the rainbow, a big blue sky (with clouds, *squints* at Los Angeles) and hardly any people. It's heaven!




Glen Canyon Dam Bridge
Near Page, AZ



These pictures don't do the land justice. The sand under these vibrant orange cliffs is green, pink and purple.

It is illegal to blow up a saguaro with explosives (called plugging) but I don't know
how else you would do it. 

The road less travelled

This is just like the fake tunnel Wile E Coyote puts up
for Roadrunner. 

Later, coming out of California in western Arizona we stopped in Quartzsite. This is where every old person in an RV comes to drive slowly. It's also the grave site of Hi Jolly. 

In 1855 the government had the idea to use camels to help build and supply a wagon route from Texas to California. A Syrian camel driver named Hadj Ali was hired to teach the the new US Camel Corps the finer points of camel driving. Hadj Ali soon became Hi Jolly to the army guys and things were going swell until the Civil War, which hogged up all the attention and the program was abandoned.

In typical ADD style, the government left the camels to fend for themselves in the desert as they went on to play war. The last wild camel was seen in 1941.

The only camels left are man-made. At least they don't spit on you.

I could climb it if I really wanted to...

Leaving the sunset behind.