Side trip to Scottsdale

We made a side trip to Phoenix (Scottsdale, actually) to meet up with some friends today.  We haven't seen Bob and Yvonne since they moved to Prescott, AZ last summer.  So we spent a couple of hours having some yummy Mexican food (from Carlos O'Briens) and catching up.  They are both retired Spirit/Boeing folks and decided to land in the southwest.  Prescott is about 2 hours north of Phoenix and we are about 2 hours south of Phoenix, so we decided to meet in the middle.  

It was great to catch up..... and to realize that, just like us, they are busy, busy, busy in retirement!  :)  Hopefully we'll get up their way this fall and get to spend a little time in Prescott.

Some sights/observations along the drive today......

I know that we have smog in Wichita.  I remember driving to work from El Dorado and on some days I could identify exactly where downtown Wichita was from quite aways out.... simply because of the brown cloud hanging over it.  But most days the wind sweeps our smog away before we even notice it.  Not so here.  Tucson is clearly in a valley and with a half million people here, they have a real smog problem.  Their winds this time of year are mostly light to calm so it is very noticeable -- particularly on our drive today.

Along the way (we were on I-10), we ran across what must have been an old car road rally.  They were running on an old highway parallel to us.  We saw an original restored Mini Cooper, an old restored Triumph, and a beautifully restored MG, as well as a few others.  I had to drool a bit over the MG as I've always wanted one -- and it was in the beautiful British racing green!

We also noticed, about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, what appeared to be an airplane boneyard.  So of course, I Googled it.  (Max always says that I'm the Google queen.  Grin.)  Turns out that it is the Pinal Airpark airplane boneyard.  They say that it has a bunch of planes from Northwest Airlines, but also have "representatives" from most of the other airlines. 

Of course it wasn't nearly as big as the boneyard in California.  Nor is it nearly as big as the military boneyard here at Davis-Monthan AFB.  Both of those are, frankly, mindboggling in their scope.  But it was kinda cool to see all those planes lined up.

The other thing we figured out on the drive to/from Phoenix is that we now know how they fund the marvelous maintenance they do on the interstate highways here in Arizona.  We saw more cops in that four hour drive than we saw in the entire 16-17 hour drive out here.  Seriously.  And they were all mostly ticketing people.  Now really, the speed limit was 75 MPH.  Is it really necessary to drive enough over that to get a ticket?!?  Sheesh!

And finally, along the way we saw Picacho Peak.  This one is from a ways out.  Sorry about the quality -- we were in the truck tooling along at, I'm sure, 75 MPH.  :) 

And this one is right as we passed the peak.  

So why include pics?  Well, just 'cause I like how the name sounds.  Peek-A-Choo!  Kept wanting to say "bless you"!  LOL