The humidity doesn’t let up for today, but that’s ok, we’ve had a great time anyway. Tess and Arnold (and Gabriel too) have done such a magnificent job of hosting us that I’m truly sad to go… we feel so at home here it will be tough. But tomorrow morning we head out for Louisianna. We’ve decided to bypass East Texas entirely as it seems to be riddled with meth addicts and satan worshippers and corporations such as Enron and Halliburton. Which is worse is questionable. We want to hang out in swamps and eat cajun food so we’re heading farther east.

South Congress is the district that Tess and Arnold live in. The atmosphere is lively and upbeat, even in the sweltering heat, and the coffee shops are cool and plenty. We’ve been treated to great food and good hang out time and gosh just overwhelming generosity and kindness. We did a last stock up stop at the giant Austin Whole Foods, where we got soy milk, granola, black beans, road food in short.

Below is the next installment of Luke and Kate’s fascinating trip adventures and fantastic accounts thereof:

Tucson, Arizona

The red mud splattered Toyota cruisd out from Beaver Creek into the Spring dryness of central arizona. The plan of action was to avoid too much desert, and or too much Phoenix, which by all accounts had been described as treacherous, bad and foreboding, to say the least. So we decided that Tucson was the place to be.

But its interesting to note here that even the idea of going to Tucson was not in our original plan… its just that as we arrived in Flagstaff just a few nights before, it was snowing heavily and it was cold. So the next day or two I kind of gazed obsessively at weather predictions for the Taos Santa Fe area, where by all accounts there would be thunderstorms and highs in the 40s. It was hard for us to let go of the idea of going to and through Santa Fe, but at the same time we felt that happiness and sunny weather go hand in hand, especially when camping and traveling. So we headed south intentionally, and somewhat reluctantly.

But as it turns out of course it was the ‘right’ decision.

Phoenix was avoidable, even from the safe distance of the Freeway around the edge of it. We stopped a couple of times at various spots, once at this supposedly interesting artists commune type place in the middle of the desert called Arcosanti. The idea of the place is to, was to create ‘an ideal urban living space’, where art and architecture intermingled with people living harmoniously and using less natural resources. The only problem was that people weren’t nice. Or happy apparently, and I know that we got a superficial glimpse of the whole deal, but wow, just unfriendly kind of aging hippies, surrounded by this cracking concrete style architecture that was quite faded and funky. I was disappointed because I thought the idea was fantastic, that architecture should lend heavily to a more utopian method of living, wherein community and creativity and resourcefulness are much more strongly encouraged than in the typical worldwide city. But it wasn’t to be for us that day at least. Arcosanti was lame.

So we got into Tucson in the very warm afternoon. Though the weather reports said 80, the real temperatures were in the high nineties, warm even for Tucson in early May. We checked into the Flamingo Hotel, a faded budget locale that glorified the glamorous years of Tucson’s movie boom, apparently the area outside of Tucson was where Westerns were filmed in their early conception. John Wayne, Paul Newman “Hombre”, and many forgotten others are displayed on movie posters outside of each of the rooms. Palm trees surround a modest swimming pool, and aside from the obvious faded glory it was an interesting place to stay.

We were surprised as we wandered around downtown Tucson that NO ONE was out and about, it was a perfect evening, it was tuesday but still, it was quiet, more quiet than most small towns. We ambled over to the Congress Cafe, which I had heard of through searching for places to play around the country, and had a sidewalk Boca Burger in the perfect warm spring air. The colors of a desert sunset linger for a really long time and it was nice to see them fade over the quiet city.

The next day we realized that we had kind of missed the exciting part of town by only a few blocks. Tucson has this mysteriously large collection of young people, college age and up, who have opened coffee shops and art galleries and thrift stores and places like that and have done it with a lot of color and flair. It was great to be among so many creative types and in the bright colors of the desert city streets, wandering through endless vintage clothes and muraled walls of health food co-ops. It was hot though, really truly hot, in a dry way, and I wondered how I or anyone could make it through the summers there. They have got to be absolutely brutal, and nothing subtle about it.