Day 20: Chester’s Chicken: Tucson, AZ to Apache Junction, AZ

Some years ago I went on a free range canoe camping trip with some wonderful friends and first born child. As with all canoe trips over several days, you tend to get a bit delirious by the end. We were staying at one of the expedition member’s cottage. On the final leg of the journey, four of the team members portaged a lot of the gear a few kms down a dirt path while 2 of us drove for 40 minutes to pick up the second shuttle vehicle. On that drive we concocted a plan to pick up Chester’s Chicken in Elk Lake after we had picked up the remainder of the team. Well, we caught Chester’s Chicken (in the Elk Lake General Store) after they had shut down the fryers. What they had was what they had. So we bought it all and set a budget on how many pieces of whatever each member got. This created 2 problems. Problem 1: our host did not know that rule and jumped right in. We quickly corrected this as we were all hungry and tired. We believe we weighted the body down sufficiently. Problem 2: Chester’s Chicken turned out to be a short term rental and there is only one outhouse at the cottage. We all survived. We have seen quite a few Chester’s Chicken signs on this trip and I have had zero desire to partake. It has, however, made me nostalgic for that great canoe trip.

Waking up after a long sleep in the KOA I suited up and headed out for a walk. I had seen a bike / walking path on my adventures yesterday so I headed for that. It ended it’s usefulness to me fairly early so I decided to just go around the block. The block was 4.2 km. Not a super long walk but we had a time budget. Mrs Milddogs hit the pool one last time and we set about packing up when she returned. We departed the Tucson Lazy Days KOA at around 1030.

It was already hot by the time we left. Yes, I know, no sympathy for hot.

First stop, Camping World. When I was there yesterday I bought a better potable water hose. It leaked. I returned it. It, as you may tell, was not, in fact, better.

Second stop, Saguaro National Park. We did the Western part of the park. We drove the dirt road loop and one of the hikes to the petroglyphs. The cacti were amazing and the petroglyphs were cool. I can only imagine some parent tens of thousands of years ago: “Jeremy, what did you do to that rock?”. Poor Jeremy probably went to bed hungry that night but here we are sitting in awe of the cool circles he drew. It was 34C as we did our hike. We are not used to that.

After we departed Saguaro National Park we headed up to Lost Dutchman State Park near Phoenix, AZ. It was a beautiful, but uneventful drive. We got to the State Park around 1500, checked in and drove to our site. It has electricity and water. We fired up the A/C right away. We don’t use the A/C at home in the humid heat of an Ontario summer but this dry heat is something else when living in a tin can!

The view from our campsite is amazing. All for $35 USD per night. I’ll take some more nights like this please! we even have our own Saguaro cactus. It’s a young one as it has not budded its arms yet. Apparently that happens at 75 to 100 years of age.

Mrs Milddogs and I had an adult beverage and then she made some home made salsa and tostadas for supper. Mmmm. Our campsite neighbours (from Ontario) stopped by for a visit. I was in my non-speedo bathing suit (lightest shorts I brought), no shirt and apparently had salsa from dinner all over my face. I present well 🙂

I set up a time lapse on my iPhone to capture the changing light on the mountain. Pro tip, those time lapses are not infinite. I failed to capture sunset in the time lapse. Tomorrow I know the rules.

We went on a nice evening hike with Amy and played “Is that a rattlesnake hole” as we walked in the twilight.

I know I say it about many of our stops, but this view is fucking amazing! I could sit here and stare at that mountain, the cacti and whatever wildlife wanders by for weeks. Damn, we don’t have that many weeks left on this adventure.

We are at this campground for 3 nights all at different sites. Tomorrow we will do some provisioning (I’m almost out of bread and peanut butter) when we have to move. Our next site does not have electricity so we may have to run the generator in the evening to run the A/C to cool down a bit. That seems like a planet unfriendly thing to do. But, I’ll probably do it.

Some of you have asked: “do you find the van confining”. The answer is no. And nobody has asked that. If you have questions, you can send me a tweet (see the feed lower right for my Twitter thing) or just contact us the way you normally do. Chances are, if you are reading this you know us.

I’ve lowered the resolution on images as they take forever to upload when the cell signal is not great. Results in many retries which chew up data cap 🙁

Turns out “usie” is in fact a term used for a selfie with more than one person. Stupid internet, I thought I was original.

Word to your mother!