It’s our last evening right outside the Ironwood National Monument Lands (northwest of Tucson), and I’m feeling the Sunday blues just as if I had to go to work tomorrow instead of picking up and moving on to the next interesting place. It’s true the desert here is flat and mostly creosote bushes, but I’ve enjoyed the quiet walks, the open sky, and two trips into town for breweries!
Sour Beer Goodness
I love very tart, complex sour beers, and not many breweries can (or choose) to pull those off. Three cheers to Crooked Tooth Brewery in Tucson, a woman-owned, moon/crystal/cacti/funky place with a tamarind sour that made me say, ”This beer is good” every time I set it down after taking a sip.
I had a second, different sour and Tracy had a stout with coco and chili, something like that—who cares because my tamarind sour was so freaking good!
For a while we had the back patio to ourselves, where we enjoyed pizza from across the alley and occasional attention from our dominatrix waitstaff. I didn’t get a photo of her, sadly.
The first mural below is on the side of the brewery; the others are famous ones in downtown Tucson that I didn’t grab shots of and stole from wikipedia and wikimedia. A guy named Joe Pagac created the bike ride one, and possibly the woman with agave on her head; I got distracted looking for details by the fact that he paints many (or all) of them at live events, and is controversial in Tucson because of his subject matter.
Kind of wish we’d gotten our hands on a mural map and driven around looking at them all—they’re gorgeous. See how I can get the Sunday blues? A week isn’t long enough.
Tucson Soaring Club
We’re parked very close to a glider strip, and Sundays is when the local soaring club must practice take offs and landings, all danged day. It’s a beautiful pattern to hear and to watch.
Once the tow plane gets the glider up and autonomous, the plane heads left and the glider right. And here so many planes are using the strip that as soon as one takes off, another circles in for landing. We were busy all day Sunday packing up but got to watch several and got a first-hand account from a fellow Airstreamer who walked over to say hi on his way out.
He’s an odd one. Big into Airstreams, as you can tell by the huge AIRSTREAM sticker on the back of his truck, the AIRSTREAM silver medallions on his mud flaps, and, just in case he meets you when he’s not with his tow vehicle or his Airstream, he wears an AIRSTREAM cap.
Sadly, our conversation began by him complaining about the ”scamdemic,” then his super liberal neighbors at a previous campsite whom he couldn’t talk with (I wonder why, when he’s throwing around inflammatory terms like that 30 seconds after meeting you), and the fact that he “physically can’t wear a mask” due to claustrophobia, nevermind the fact that he’s wearing seemingly without problem a cap and sunglasses. Airstream cap, lest you forget.
My positive point here is that he hung around the glider port and was invited up in one, so he told us details about take off and landing, and how he gained elevation by lowering the nose. He also was a wealth of information about trailer wiring and camping in Mexico. See, we can talk with anyone (as long as we keep our mouths shut).
Well, goodbye, Tucson. Next up: we head straight south to the Mexican border again for more of who knows what. In the meantime, my heart is with Ukraine.
