tumbleweeds in Tucson

It’s hard to believe our dash to the desert is almost over. Ryan and I have logged more than 2,000 miles since Tuesday, and on Saturday morning we’ll arrive in Glendale. In some ways it seems we’ve been gone weeks, in others it’s flown past.

Days like today we’ll never forget. From El Paso we crossed the border into Juarez. For both of us it was the first time in Mexico (see Ryan’s Juarez blog posting and picture gallery).

The drive from El Paso to Tucson, where we are staying tonight, was amazing and caught us totally by surprise. We expected desert, but not like this.

Texas gave us rolling, rock-strewn landscapes. New Mexico’s desert was perfectly flat except for the those hills and mesas jutting up here and there in the distance. In Arizona we saw snow-covered peaks, a cactus or two and our first tumble weed (Ryan first spotted it tumbling casually across I-10).

Nothing out here calls to mind the University of Florida or Ohio State. This land has a prehistoric feel to it. It conjures up images of dinosaurs and woolly mammoths way before it does Gators and Buckeyes.

Hmmm, anyone think that might change the closer we get to Glendale?

Jeff