Story Time

So. At one point, I promised you stories of our adventures in southern Arizona. And I promised I would tell you those soon. Apparently, my definition of "soon" is pretty loose, because here it is more than two weeks later, and I still haven't told you anything about our run for the border or the crazy winery in Nogales or . . . but I get ahead of myself.

Let's begin at the beginning and go on until we reach the end.

The beginning is my parents' house in Tucson. We left around 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, taking my dad's Toyota Camry, which he was nice enough to lend us for the road trip. I don't think he'll be making that mistake again.

BUT ANYWAY.

We drove out through South Tucson, eventually reaching this area outside city limits where people have settled who want to have horses and goats and 20 junked cars in their front yard without interference from a homeowners association. If you swap out the cactus for trees and add some water, it looked just like home.

BUT ANYWAY AGAIN.

We continued south to Tubac, which A. remembered as a place with the ruins of an old Spanish fort and a couple of dudes with goats. But that was like eight years ago and Tubac has been transformed since then. The old Spanish fort (called a presidio) has been carefully preserved and is now the site of a pretty good museum, and the two guys with goats have made way for an entire artists' community, complete with fake adobe and a billion brightly-colored pots that were probably purchased for two bucks in Mexico to be sold to tourists at five times their value. The museum was good, but the little shops weren't to our taste, so we got back on the road and went to Nogales.

Nogales, in case you don't know, is a border town. We didn't have our passports, so we couldn't cross the border, but we did want to eat lunch on the American side. We wanted Mexican food, of course, but it's kind of hard to find Mexican food five feet from Mexico. McDonalds, Popeye's, Wendy's . . . chain after chain of fast food. We finally found a Mexican restaurant, where A. had pozole and I had chicken mole (pronounced like "mo-lay," not like the rodent), and then we got back on the road to work our way towards Tombstone via Patagonia.

Except on our way down Route 82, the small two-lane road we were on, we passed this ramshackle old barn of a building with a sign advertising "European-style wine." We blew past the sign, then both did a double-take, saying something like, "European-style wine outside Nogales? We gotta go back." So we did. And it was awesome. Most wineries I've been to have been new and sterile and pretty pretentious. This place, Arizona Vineyards, was nothing like that. It was an old, kind of falling-down building. It looked like the entrance to a mine shaft or something. When you walk in, you walk into a huge space that has wine vats on one side, and on the other side is the path that leads you to the tasting room. The path is enclosed by all kinds of random antique junk--thrones, stuffed animal heads--and lit by little white Christmas lights. The tasting room is another mass of antiques. When we got to the tasting room, there was a guy working who looked barely old enough to drink himself. But he was eating pizza, drinking red wine, and blasting Mexican rap. It was fantastic. And the wine was really good, too. We tasted a bunch (for FREEEEE--yay!), then bought a couple of bottles of red and one white and went on our way.

You should totally stop there if you ever get the chance. You know, next time you're on Route 82 outside Nogales.

Next stop was Patagonia, which A. remembered as a pretty sleepy little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Except, once again, that was like eight years ago, and it now appears to have become yet another artists' colony. Are you sensing a theme here? They were having their "Art Walk" the day we were there, which means there were far too many people in town for our liking, so we took a quick look around and then started to Tombstone.

We stopped in Fairbank, a not-very-interesting ghost town on the banks of the San Pedro river, and ended up getting to Tombstone around 4 p.m. After quickly scoping out the motels in town, we ended up staying at The Trail Rider's Inn. The proprietor was this middle-aged, sunburned Englishman who looked like he was perpetually drunk. Or stoned, maybe, but I think drunk, because he told us about his local pub and mentioned that he walks there all the time, and when we went there at 7 p.m. that night, he was parked at the end of bar looking very much like a fixture.

But that all comes later. First, we must venture into Tombstone: The Town Too Tough To Die. Except I think its slogan should be Tombstone: Disneyland with Chaps and Spurs. It's a very carefully preserved (or just re-built, maybe) Old West town, with the dusty street and the board sidewalks. And shop after shop of Indian jewelry and places to get your picture taken wearing slutty barmaid's attire and guys in chaps and cowboy hats walking around impersonating Wyatt Earp. It's all very tacky, but kind of fun. We elected to skip the staged gunfight re-enactments of the shootout at the O.K. corral and instead went to see the biggest rosebush in the world.

You didn't know that the biggest rosebush in the world is in Tombstone, Arizona? Yup, it's in the Guinness Book of World's Records and everything. The bush came from Scotland sometime in the 1880's and was planted in the courtyard of a house in Tombstone, where it has been ever since. You have to pay five bucks to see it, but it is SO WORTH IT. It has a trunk as big as a tree. Seriously, it's about five feet in diameter. And the branches have been trellised overhead, so that when you walk into the courtyard, it's like you're in an outdoor room in which the ceiling is composed of a single rose bush. It was blooming when we were there, but the blooms are pretty small and unimpressive. It's the sheer size of the thing that's impressive. It just goes on and on. Very cool.

That was pretty much it for that day. I have one more day's worth of stories (descending into a mine, off-roading along the border in a Camry. . .), but I think I'll end here for today. And as a reward for reading all the way through this long travelogue, I'll leave you with this:

Playtime with Auntie Mia