By the Time We Got to Phoenix

Well, by the time we got there, it was late in the day, the day before we had an appointment at the Scamp outpost in the city. But let’s backtrack a little, to how we got to Phoenix.

We left Bisbee and took a two-lane highway that almost—but not quite—went into Mexico, in the far southern part of Arizona. We saw “the wall,” which appears as a tiny dark line in the photo below, just above and to the right of the street sign that says Cana Street. Those mountains are in Mexico.

Almost, but not quite, to Mexico

We looped around and headed north, back past Karchner Caverns, then west to Tucson. We found a nice state park in the Catalina Mountain foothills, and discovered the park was full of interesting lizards and Saguaro cacti. There were at least four different kinds of lizards, and we particularly liked the chunky ones that did pushups intended to frighten us. We were not frightened. There were also smaller lizards—but still larger than the Lazarus lizards we are accustomed to in Cincinnati.

 
A lot of Saguaro catci and a little desert lizard

We also met a former National Parks/Forest Service ranger and exchanged a lot of info about interesting things to see, in the southwest and elsewhere, while talking to her for an hour or more one morning. She was somewhat forcibly retired in February 2025, and like us, she is wandering around in her camper until she figures out where she wants to settle down. She’s been lots of places, and at first I thought I’d actually run into the main character in Nevada Barr’s mysteries that are set in national parks—she fit the description perfectly! But her name was Casey, not Anna, alas. But she could probably write a book or six about her experiences in the parks, too.

From Tucson, we took the Pinal Pioneer Parkway northwest toward Phoenix. We had an appointment set up, so we couldn’t dally, but there was one thing I had to see, and so we stopped about 20 miles from Florence, Arizona, at a roadside rest area. There’s a monument there to the old-time silent movie cowboy star and trick rider Tom Mix, a favorite of my father, and a favorite of mine, too. The marker is where he died, near an arroyo that is now named Tom Mix Wash. He died on October 12, 1940, traveling between stops with a Wild West show he owned at the time. A few miles south of Florence, quite in the middle of nowhere, the wash had flooded and Mix lost control of his 1937 Cord Phaeton detouring around it. The car turned over, and the Wild West show cash box, which had been on the back window ledge, flew forward and broke Mix’s neck. He died instantly.

 
At the Tom Mix monument south of Florence, Arizona, on the Pinal Pioneer Parkway

The memorial is a metal sculpture of Mix’s horse, Tony the Wonder Horse. It was the highlight of my day to see it. Fun facts about Tom Mix and his somewhat famous afterlife: his photo appears in the collage on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, there’s a great novelized version of his life by Darryl Ponican called Tom Mix Died for Your Sins, and in a 1988 movie called Sunset, James Garner played Wyatt Earp and Bruce Willis played his friend Tom Mix. Mix was actually a pall bearer at Earp’s funeral in Hollywood.

  
At left, Tom Mix (circled in red) on the Sgt. Pepper cover;
at right, James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Bruce Willis as Tom Mix

But . . . we were heading to Phoenix. So back to that story. The Pinal Pioneer Highway was fine, but when it took us to U.S. 60, and then—UGH—I-10, we discovered that Phoenix is a lot like Seattle. Your handy dandy GPS guide may tell you it takes two hours to travel from one side of the city to the other, but in reality it takes five hours. You just sit in stopped traffic quite a lot, even in the middle of the afternoon, long before rush hour.

So it took a long, long time from the Mix Memorial to Surprise!—at the northwest corner of Phoenix. We took refuge in a motel for the night, and bright and early the next morning, we braved Phoenix traffic again to get to the Scamp place. We had met Lyle, the fellow who is running the Phoenix outpost, when we picked up our camper in Minnesota originally, so we re-introduced ourselves and met his wife who also works there. They gave us some suggestions on where to stay next, and the mechanic, Dan, fixed our wheel bearings, checked our brakes, and installed a new catch on the silverware drawer.

The Scamp showroom in Phoenix

In just a couple of hours, we were on the road again, in the general direction of the Grand Canyon. We stopped for the night at LoLoMai RV Resort, suggested by Lyle. It was . . . really crowded. We were there on a Friday night, and there were lots of parties and family groups and just not our cup of tea, although it was a lovely location on Oak Creek, a veritable oasis. Not thrilled with the noisy neighbors, we decided to drive the 10 miles to the town of Sedona to get dinner and then stay in town until “quiet time” at the campground, around 9:00 pm.

  

What a serendipity! Sedona is set in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, red rock formations all around. And sunset is the perfect time to view the formations, as the setting sun hits them and they fairly glow in the golden light. So there was a literal bright side to the noisy environment at LoLoMai, and I’m really glad the noisy folks drove us out of the campground to see these gorgeous rocks.

 

We ate at a place on the busy main thoroughfare called Don Diego’s and learned that it was a reference to Don Diego de la Vega, also known as . . . Zorro! And Zorro himself, according to the legend, had come to Sedona for the healing powers of the place (it is big on mystical, magical, crystal, healing, New Age things). He stayed, in fact, along the Oak Creek to heal from the injuries he suffered fighting injustice.

Long story short, Sedona is an awesome place, especially at sunset in the spring, with those red rocks surrounded by vibrant green cottonwood, sycamore, oak, and willow trees along the always-flowing creek. I don’t doubt it can heal what ails you.