Election Day and we are fleeing the country. (We voted early.)
We got an early start. Suitcases needed to be in the lobby by 6 AM, then breakfast, a rather meager buffet—scrambled eggs, bacon, breakfast potatoes, oatmeal. No bread. No fruit. No yogurt. I was surprised by that, especially the lack of bread of any kind.
The bus left at 7. Our guide, Carlos, is giving us the thumbs up.
We sat near the back, but got good window seats. The day was spent driving through the Sonora Desert from Phoenix to Tucson to Nogales to San Carlos on the Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez. We made a rest stop mid-morning and another mid-afternoon, plus customs and immigration and lunch an hour south of that.
Customs involved everyone getting off the bus, identifying our luggage and having it X-rayed. Immigration took longer as only 6 at a time were allowed into the building to fill out our forms and pay the tourism tax. Only one person working there. We were 38, including guide and driver. It took about an hour and a half. Could have been much longer if there had been another bus ahead of us. Carlos had prepared us for as much as three hours so by the law of expectations we were pleasantly surprised.
Lunch was at a truck stop sort of place with the choice of chicken enchiladas or “elephant ear” (beef schnitzel and fries.) Steve and I got one of each and switched plates half way through. We both liked the elephant ear better. The enchilada had an out-of-the-can kind of flavor.
Our guide talked as we left Phoenix, passed through Tucson, entered Nogales, etc, but after lunch we had a traditional Mexican siesta. By that time the desert was starting to look a lot alike. I was sorry that we hadn’t stopped any place where I could get a picture of a saguaro cactus. (I avoid shooting from a moving bus.) They are fabulous. I didn’t realize that they live to be as much as 200 years old. They only grow an inch in 10 years. They don’t get their first “arm” until 50 years. At one point we passed a field that was full of them. Really weird to think that they hadn’t been disturbed in at least a hundred years.
After our siesta, Carlos put on a National Geographic program on the Sonora Desert.
Caravan has the practice of rotating where you sit so no one can grab the best seats and claim them. Today we were on the left side of the bus, so all morning we struggled with the sun. A good thing that there wasn't a lot to see in the desert. The afternoon was much better, but then people on the right side of the bus were closing their curtains against the sun so we couldn’t see.
We loved the view from our room in San Carlos. Note the masts of the marina between us and the mountain.
Dinner was by the pool.
We are beginning to get to know people. Tonight at dinner we sat with Jim and Carol (pre-school sub), Jamie (a dentist who splits time between MN and Savannah, GA), Amy Nelson, an Iranian Jew named Koorosh who has been in the States since 1969, and Inderjit, a Sikh from Punjab who has been in the States since the early 1970s. The last two worked together as electrical engineers before retirement.
The hotel provided a musical performance while we ate whose intonation was not up to the Minnesota Orchestra standards on our Rhone or Danube trips. [Jamie, who was sitting directly across from me, teased me the whole trip about how I cringed a couple times at the unintended dissonance.]
No comments:
Post a Comment