Tucson: Day 6

This is what I love about Tucson - a random mosaic wall in front of a convenience store. It's not anyplace special, but the owners have created art on an ordinary wall where you can sit and drink your 20 oz. soda. It would give the city council in Newport the vapours, the black horrors, and three other kinds of hysteria-induced archaic ailments. I think it's great.

Lynette and I slept late on my last day in Tucson while the Army Dude and his sister Penny went to an appointment with the doctor. We two sat around in our pajamas and chatted while she took her osteoporosis meds and I checked my email (we are amazing multi-taskers). Later, Lynette, the Army Dude, and I went back to The Lost Barrio to look around a bit more. We followed this up with a trip back to 4th Street, where we had cold drinks and pastries at our favorite coffee shop. It's funny - I've been to Tucson often enough to have a favorite coffee shop. I am amazed by that.

Another very cool thing about Tucson is that "horse country" begins inside the city limits. Barely a ten-minute drive from an area with supermarkets and a Walgreens, you can find this. If you know where to look. Some friends of Penny live in an old adobe ranch house surrounded by horse paddocks and mesquite trees, and this is the view from their backyard. It's a little patch of heaven that's about ten degrees cooler than just a few miles up the road.

It would have been slightly more heavenly if the owner didn't keep talking about Rattlesnake Encounters Right Here In My Yard. I think she was doing it to scare the greenhorns from back east (which worked on me but not the Army Dude - apparently, rattlesnakes are no big deal when you've encountered camel spiders), but it just goes to show you that in this life you can't have everything. In Tucson, though, you get pretty darn close.