Road Trip: Day Four

We awoke in our remote campsite and had a breakfast of Mountain Dew and day old donuts while sitting in the Xterra to get out of the wind and cold. The extra quilt purchased a couple days before and put over our sleeping bags last night was amazing: no cold feet, no waking up a little cold, just sleeping in confort.

We then proceeded to tear down camp and headed back to Socorro to gas up, brush our teeth with running water, and get our bearings to head out to a giant radio telescope observatory that Margaret and I wished to see. As it turns out the antenna array was just farther down the road that we had been camping on (our campsite was about the halfway point to the array, have I mentioned that our campsite was pretty far out).

We headed out the remote road that seemed to head to nowhere, just a grey line that disappeared on the horizon. Eventually we pass some mountains and there is a series of white dots on the plains ahead of us: The Very Large Array. We did the walking tour of the place, as well as hitting the gift shop. Margaret purchased a hoodie for herself.

We then headed back east to Socorro and gassed up once again. We decided that we've done enough touring of New Mexico and wanted to head for our ultimate destination of Southern Arizona: Tuscon. I revved the engine on the Xterra to 4K RPM and set cruise control for a legal velocity and aimed for the horizon. The road was mine, the miles tore past, the towns flashed past the windshield and finally we reached the promised land: Arizona.

Onwards we went; Tuscon started to appear on the miles-to signs. Our destination was in sight. Then the inevitable happened, the sun started to set. For a while I could flip down the sun visor and cover the sun, then I had to sit up really straight to see, eventually I was holding my hand in front of my face to block the sun. Misery was a yellow-orange dot on the horizon. The sun slid under the line where sky meets ground just as I entered Tuscon construction traffic. We found a quality hotel called Quality Inn to spend the night.

Once we had checked into our hotel, we went looking for a grocery store. Cheese, apples, and bananas were on the menu for the night, and we had none of them. The grocery store was trivial to find, pull onto main road outside the hotel head, head north, you can't miss the big Safeway sign. The bookstore we hit after the grocery store was less trivial. After much driving, and a "There it is!!!" from Margaret we pulled into a Barnes and Noble's to purchase books about rockhounding in Arizona as well as campsites in the same state. The Falcon "Camping StateX" books are quite good; the cover the more primitive campsites the AAA Camp Book doesn't (as we aren't in an RV, hookups for one are rather silly and not worth paying for).

We then settled into the hotel for the night eating our fruit and cheese, and watched the movie Bowfinger. Margaret never saw the movie before and it appears the she thought it was amusing. After the movie ended, the lights were turned out and we went to sleep.