Road Trip 2010! Days 4 and 5 / Flagstaff, Phoenix and Tucson

It's amazing what a difference a good night's sleep can make. We got into the hotel in Flagstaff and crashed, actually getting a good night sleep. That night we also discovered that the Arizona Cardinals were holding their training camp at Northern Arizona University, right across the street from the hotel. Justin and I arrived at the field in the morning around 8:30 to find about 200 people already there, waiting for the practice to start. It was pretty cool being so close to some big name football players like Matt Leinart, Larry Fitzgerald and Beanie Wells. We had planned to watch the whole practice but the combination of the heat and the lack of hitting drills (they were just wearing helmets and shoulder pads) led us to leave a little bit early. We got back to the hotel and packed up to head into Phoenix and hang out with Cristal!

It was great seeing Cristal again. The oppressive heat in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, led us to hang out indoors for pretty much the whole day which let us spend plenty of time reminiscing about Green 2 craziness. We hung out, went to get a movie and some Sonic, then checked in for the night. In the morning I went for a run in the neighborhood before it got too crazy hot, although it was still 85 degrees at 8 AM. After packing up and saying goodbye to Cristal (which sucked big time) we drove onward to Tucson to see Saguaro National Park.

The park was amazingly beautiful - much more so than I had anticipated. Normally when one thinks of deserts and cacti, one assumes that there will be lots of sand dunes, oppressive heat and not much to be interested in. I was really surprised by how much plant life there was in the desert. There were several main kinds of plants that created a pretty thickly vegetated landscape. Also, there were plenty of animals including a tarantula hawk, some kind of field mouse, a vulture and a scorpion. Interesting things about the tarantula hawk: not a spider or a bird. It's actually an enormous wasp that poisons a tarantula and lays its eggs in it. When the eggs mature and hatch, the larvae eat the body of the tarantula that they've been living in. We finished our tour of the park at Javelina Rock, a large tilted block of gneiss (metamorphosed granite) which was really fun to climb on and gave you a view of the entire valley in which Tucson is built.

So, tonight we're staying at a super-cheap hotel in Tucson and then will be driving though New Mexico and southwestern Texas tomorrow on our way to New Orleans. It'll definitely be a long haul, but hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of reading and quality time in with Justin and Sarah. So far, everything's going well!