Tucson- SEED Pod, SkyBar, Second City Does Arizona; Boyce-Thompson Arboretum; Scottsdale- (Taliesin West)

(posted from Apache Junction Library)
(This post covers 6 – 8 April, 2010)

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Thursday, 8 April-

We had a quiet night at Oak Flats and woke to a very pleasant day. We've been surprised how cool the nights have been. The night before last went below freezing but last night only went into the mid-Forties.
We drove west on route 60 toward Phoenix, looking for a visitor center for info and a wi-fi connection. After Apache Junction we saw a sign for an Arizona visitor's center and took the bait. Three miles off of our route we finally found the visitor's center and Chamber of Commerce for Gilbert, AZ. They had some type of social going on so the too-small room was crowded and we couldn't look at the rather meager selection of tourist brochures. I asked one staffer if they had wi-fi and was told yes. But when I tried it outside the building, the chamber wi-fi was locked. I asked another staffer for the password but she said they don't have wi-fi for the public. We left and decided we'd try the visitor center in Tempe. There we had the same problems. A small center with not much to select from, a staff who could only suggest we try the Starbucks for wi-fi and you had to have a special key to use the rest room. Did we hit a time warp or something?
We used the GPS to find Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's famous school for budding architects. We took the 90-minute tour and enjoyed it very much. Like Falling Water in western Pennsylvania, Taliesin West is showing its age but it's easy to see what excitement it would have caused at the time. Even today the tours are filled and there's barely room to park in the extra-large parking lot.
After Taliesin West, we looked up the addresses of art galleries and found a gallery district on Scottsdale's Main Street in Old Town. We parked just off Scottsdale Avenue and spent the next three hours touring the dozens and dozens of galleries and a few antiques-and-curiosities shops.
By 1700 we were exhausted. We used the GPS to take us out of the city to Lost Dutchman State Park above Apache Junction and arrived just as the sun set.
After supper we dug out the Kwik Kampfire and sat around the fire for an hour or so, skywatching. Labashi spotted a satellite and we had lots of plane lights to follow and stars to see.

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Wednesday, 7 April-

This morning we took our good time with breakfast and took nice, long showers. We then drove back up route 77 past Oracle and kept on going to Winkleman where we turned toward Superior. This road 177 passes through the Copper Basin and we saw mountain after mountain of copper-mine tailings. We had lunch at the overlook of the Ray strip mine, watching the teeny-tiny-little giant dump trucks and power shovels at work down in the pit. The dump trucks didn't look to be all that impressive until I saw an 18-wheeler beside one and realized the scale.
The other thing along this route was the carpets of wildflowers. To date we've been seeing a few flowers here and there. But now the desert started showing us mixes of yellow poppies, cream poppies, orange poppies, blue-belles, and red, pink, and purple trumpets as far as wild flowers plus green grasses and weeds among the cactuses.
At Superior we turned onto route 60 and soon came to our goal for the day-- Boyce-Thompson Arboretum State Park. I've been reading wildflower reports from this park since I first found DesertUSA.com and its wildflower reports from the southwestern states. But what I didn't know was it has been a world-class botanical garden for years. We were surprised to find it wasn't really a state park so much as a massive garden of gardens.
We spent the whole afternoon walking the gardens and seeing many plants we've never seen before.
We tired out around 1600 and drove north toward Globe to the Tonto National Forest and a little campground not far off the main road called Oak Flats. We spent the evening blogging and reading and getting introduced to the Phoenix metro area for tomorrow.

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Tuesday, 6 April-

This morning we drove back down the Catalina Highway toward Tucson. We stopped at an overlook giving us a spectacular early-morning view of Tucson. We could even see the observatory buildings at Kitt Peak far off across the valley. A morning hot-air balloonist was up in the distance and soon disappeared among the peaks.
We drove back across Tucson to the University of Arizona. Last night I read a little blurb about their 'SEED-Pod' project and wanted to see it if I could. SEED is an acronym for Solar-Energy-Efficient-Design and the idea of a seed-pod is that in nature a seed-pod protects its contents from the elements. This project participated in the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon.
On our way to the SEED project, we walked through the Architecture and Landscape Architecture building to the low-water-use garden. This small garden even has a a fish pond and marsh in the desert thanks to air-conditioner condensate sent to it from the roof and from carefully-placed catchments and angled surfaces which guide the water into channels and pipes leading toward the garden.
Beside the garden were five or six travel-trailer-sized constructions. They are the modules of the SEED-Pod. One is a large, oddly-shaped open steel frame which gives us a clue as to the skeleton of all the modules. The other modules were covered with plastic tarps but we found a few places to peek in. One module was obviously a bathroom, one a kitchen, and I presume the others were living and sleeping spaces. If I understand correctly (and I'm only going by the short blurb because we couldn't see much under the tarps), modules bolt together side-to-side at the demonstration site. The roof is covered in solar panels and those are the exclusive power source for the home. At least some of the walls are a translucent plastic. Where such walls are oriented toward the sun, rainwater and filtered graywater is cascaded over them to gather the heat during the day. That water is collected in tanks built into the undercarriage of the dwelling and continues to circulate at night to cool the water for the next day. We were unable to see any detail but asked for more info and were directed to uasolardecathlon.com. I'd have loved to have been able to walk through the assembled structure and see it in operation but for now it's in storage so the web site will have to do.
We then walked across the street to tour the UA Art Museum. I was very impressed by the Renaissance artwork and the infra-red studies of some paintings which showed hidden sketch-lines and details we otherwise can't see.
While reading through 'Tucson Weekly' newspaper last night I had found a listing for a performance we might want to see so we drove to the Temple of Music and Art to learn more. We weren't sure we wanted to spend the $31-54 per ticket cost listed in the paper. But when we learned that balcony tickets are available on Tuesdays for only $10, the decision was easy. The show in question was “Second City Does Arizona or Thanks But No Saguaro”. The Second City writing tem had visited Tucson for three weeks in January to gather material and tonight's show is a preview for this weekend's opener.
We walked from our parking spot at the Temple of Music box office to another of the 'Best-of-Arizona' restaurants listed in Arizona Highways magazine. This one was Cafe Poca Coso where we took a chance on the 'plato'. From a listing of eight or so dishes available, the staff selects three for your plato. We had a pork with spicy-red sauce, a beef with a mild-green-chile sauce, and a chicken in a chocolate mole. The latter sounds decadent but the chocolate taste is very, very light.
We then drove to Tucson's Sixth-and-Sixth galleries district and walked through six art galleries but didn't find anything extra-special though we did enjoy conversations about the works. One gallerie, the Eric Firestone Gallery, has an extensive showing of candid and posed photos of Andy Warhol taken by various people, including such names as Annie Leibowitz and Robert Mapplethorpe.
We then went on to the Tucson Museum of Art which had an Andy Warhol exhibit and an Ed Mells exhibit as well as extensive collections of very old Mexican and Central American pottery and effigies. We happened to walk in just as a tour of the Warhol exhibit was starting so tagged along and learned interesting new things about his work.
By this time we were quite tired so we found a quiet, shaded corner of the Museum of Art parking lot and took a break. I took a power-nap (yeah, right!) and Labashi read.
We then drove back to the Galleries area for supper. We had seen ads for read the SkyBar (Tucson's Astronomy Bar!) and its next-door neighbor, Brooklyn Pizza. We've not had pizza for ages so we ordered a special one from the pizza shop. We also loved seeing the readout of the solar panels and electrical feed. While we were there the solar panels on the roof were putting out 4725 watts and the two businesses (SkyBar and Brooklyn Pizza) were using a total of 5225 watts.
Next door we ordered margaritas while waiting for our pizza. These were different to say the least. They used Hornitos Reposado tequila, , fresh lime juice, a dash of bitters, and a dash of flower-water. The bartender then must have dipped the largish piece of orange peel we saw next in liquor because he then turned it away from his fingers and lit it with a lighter and it poofed with an impressive flash of flame. He then twisted the peel very tightly and laid it atop our drinks. We also notice he hadn't rimmed the entire top of the margarita glass in salt. He had merely dipped it at an angle to moisten it and then at the same angle into the salt, leaving one side of the glass salted about three-quarters of an inch down and the other side plain. Very nice!
The SkyBar, by the way, was fairly deserted this early so we don't really know what happens when things get going. There were four large screens and just before we left we saw some projected images of planets and galaxies. But the schedule does show some odd things. Sometimes they're showing photos taken via their own scopes (one of which was a Meade 14 or 16-inch dobsonian light-cannon sitting in the corner). But on Mondays there are new-age metaphysics talks. And on Thursdays there are fire-walking shows. And local universities are invited to bring their classes to the SkyBar (though the day, I presume) to use the projection system for their lectures while their students have a latte. A bit different, no?
We then went to the Second City performance at the Temple of Music and Art. All in all, the show was quite funny though we were at a disadvantage on some jokes. We didn't get allusions to Governer Jim Brewer, for example. The troupe did two improvisations, the first after selecting a teacher from the audience and bringing her on stage to run for governor under the state's Clean Elections law. That skit was very funny and inventive. But a second one late in the show fell flat when the audience member didn't really try. 'What do you do?” “I sell software”. What do you most dislike about your job? “Selling software” “What do you like most about your job?” “Money”. Not much to play off of there.
The funniest skit was a pantomime about a lonely guy and his blow-up-doll date. It was so hilarious because of her absolutely stunning talent in playing the doll. She had the perfect vacant, unseeing expression and her limbs bobbed perfectly to each jostle as the guy struggled to, say, suavely put his arm around her. The end was a bit predictable but the two actors were so perfect that we still laughed and laughed.
After the show we drove back out of Tucson to Catalina State Park for the night and went right to bed.

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