Old Timer Garage

Today is THE day: we are starting our road trip.
As usual since we have arrived here, the weather is perfect and already pretty hot. There is no cloud in sight and for us coming from the UK (and even more so in October) it is more than appreciated.  

We take a quick breakfast and make sure we haven’t forgotten anything: our luggage of course because we won’t come back to Nogales before flying back to Europe but also and more importantly bottles of water, a lot of them. We had if memory serves me well around 50 litres of water in the car for the four of us and we bought more several times over the trip.

Everything is loaded in the car and we head north. The check point is passed quickly, the officer will just ask us what it is with all the luggage in the car but our foreign accent probably helping, we are free to go without more questions. After just about an hour, we pass Tucson without stopping and carry on towards the north.
The plan for today is to take a walk in Saguaro National Park or in other words: cactus, cactus and more cactus…
The road is straighter than ever and as I am not driving for now, I enjoy the scenery and try to get familiar with the American cars around me that I don’t know that well yet. Pickup trucks everywhere, a few classics and a modern Corvette is what I can still remember today. 

When we get to the Saguaro National Park car park, there is no shadow anywhere. I am starting to understand why people are putting pieces of carpet over the dashboards of their cars here. The sun burns everything. We have to park right in the middle of the car park and after having loaded our back packs with water bottles, we start walking following the signs.

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At first, it is a very wide and flat path that we are taking. We are very far from the tiny paths from the Pyrenees where I grew up. It is already very hot and we have been advised by the people at the desk where we had to pay our entrance that we must have a lot of water with us because tourists and even locals die every year because they leave with not enough water and can’t make it back.

Our plan is to walk up the mountain until a point that is called Seven falls. The pictures we saw online look very nice and it is only a 4 mile walk.

 

After only 30 minutes on the flat paths, we get to the crossing where different circuits are starting from. Ours is a narrow path that goes into the cactus fields. The scenery doesn’t change much but the walk become a little more technical. The path is narrow and rocky. I can’t help but wonder how many snakes there might be in this sort of environment and that we should probably be careful but the only thing we have seen so far is a sign asking walkers to be careful with the mountain lions. In the end, we will see no snake, no mountain lion and… no water.

After almost two hours walking, it is time to stop to get something to eat. While my brother and the girls prepare sandwiches with what we bought this morning, I walk a little further. I can walk faster on my own and I think that it would be a shame to go back down so close to our goal if the falls are right behind the next bend. But after about 20 minutes walking at a fast pace next to the dry river bed, I have to admit that there will be no water. And to top that up, during the 20 minute walk on my own, I have not crossed more than 4 people and my phone doesn’t get any signal here. So it is probably much wiser to go back down where the others are waiting for me and not risk getting in trouble here where I can’t get help.
When I get where I left them, my brother and the girls are chatting with a couple of tourists who like us came here to try and find the falls.
We chat for a while. I love this sort of encounters. It usually doesn’t last long but I have met awesome people sometimes like that. Some of them had great stories to tell and it is always nice to share a story with someone from a different culture.

After they have left, we finish eating our sandwiches and decide to start heading back down the mountain. There will be no water here and the girls are starting to get tired. The scenery is amazing with all these cactus. Some of them are more the 5 meters high. There are a few trees but apart from that, it is only cactus and rocks everywhere. I find this scenery soothing. We finish our walk almost out of water even though we had taken over 2 litres of it per person.

 

One of my shoes decided that she didn’t want to go any further and the sole started splitting from the rest of the show a couple of miles before we got to the car so I put it back together using the lace of the show and they will end up in the bin of the car park.
Walking bare foot on the car park tarmac wasn’t the idea of the century after a 40 degree day but luckily for me there wasn’t far to go to get to the car.

One of the guards from the Park asks us if we saw any bear. We didn’t even know that was part of the possible animals we could meet here and the girls are happy to learn that at the end of the walk. The guard explains us that they have to put special trash cans that lock themselves close to prevent the bears from searching through them. He also tells us that in order to see the falls and some water, we would have to come between June and September but it is also the most dangerous moment of the year to come around this area because of the monsoon season. Apparently many people die every year here because of the very fast raise of the water in this season.

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And we are back on the road. I didn’t know it back then but I would come back here less than 6 months later to show it to my mum.
We now have around 90 minutes to drive to our next and last stop for today: Phoenix. We have an AirBnB booked for the night there.

We finish the day in a dinner in the outskirts of Phoenix where we are the stars of the night. Our French accent (which I personally hate) seems to be drawing a lot of attention and the waitresses will stand next to our table the whole time listening in to what we are saying. They must have forgotten that we also can speak English because they keep commenting on what we were saying as if we weren’t there.

Tomorrow, we will go and visit the outlets before driving towards Jerome Ghost Town.
Not many cars to show on this leg of our trip but this will change starting from tomorrow.

To be continued… here: 6- Phoenix outlets and Jerome Ghost town

 

 

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