Hoping to get an early start on
whatever we need to before heading out for a ride, last night I purposely set
the alarm for 7 a.m. And this morning I mumbled
‘no way’ when I turned it off. At night
it always seems like a noble idea to get up early to start my day…different
story when I’m confronted with actually doing it in the morning. Despite my best intention of going back to
sleep, sunlight was shining through the vent cover of the trailer and lighting
up the inside so it seemed prudent to get up and soak up the sunshine…if it had
been cloudy, it would have been much easier to snuggle down for a hour or so
more.
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I still haven’t found anything that
tells me why the ‘cochitos’ are pig shaped.
Victoria tells me that the little notch at the top gives it a piggy bank
look. Kim did some research of his own after reading about my questions. He found a blurb on allrecipes.com
that talks about pig shaped gingerbread cookies
that oddly don’t have any ginger or cinnamon in them. They get their spicy
deliciousness from molasses. These
cookies are called marranitos and sometimes cochinos or puerquitos. Again nothing about the significance
of the pig shape or what the word cochitos
means. I went to the store tonight to some things and asked the girl in the
bakery if she knew why the cookies were pig shaped. She said there were other sizes in the store (bigger)
but these (indicating the cookies in my hand) were the little piggies. When I asked
again if she knew why they were all pig shaped, she shrugged and said she wasn’t
real sure about that but they were just called the piggies. J
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| Taking pictures of the heavens |
It’s not my standard practice to
vacation in the same spot year after year.
In fact on long trips, I usually vary my route to relieve monotony, see something
different, expand my horizons, whatever…I just prefer not to take the same route
all the time. When planning this trip,
Kim wanted to go back to Picacho for a few days. He likes the desert area and it was a great
area for star gazing. I didn’t have a
problem with that so we made this our westernmost stop. Skies haven’t been real cooperative at night
so far…there’s been a thin layer of clouds which makes the photography end of
it a little difficult. But tonight…tonight
is a great night for taking pictures of the heavens!
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Interstate 10 (I-10) is the southernmost cross-country
interstate highway in the American Interstate Highway System. It stretches
from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, CA, to Jacksonville, FL. This freeway is part of the originally
planned Interstate Highway network that was laid out in 1956, and its last
section was completed in 1990. I-10 is
the fourth-longest Interstate Highway in the United States, following I-90,
I-80 and I-40. About one third of its
length is within the state of Texas, where the freeway spans the state at its
widest breadth (Wikipedia). It’s the highway zooming past the campground
and it goes right through the city of Tucson; however, Tucson has a great
frontage road system which facilitates getting around in the city and helps
avoid the chaos and speed of I-10.
Discovered today the section of the frontage road about a block from the
dealership to about a block beyond is under construction. Had to do an unexpected little work around to
get where we needed to go but at least we avoided the highway all the way
there.
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Zeus has a navigation system and built
into it is every Harley dealership in the U.S.
We wanted to get to the Tucson dealership to see about a clutch lever
for Zeus so I thought I’d play with it, even though we knew how to get there
from previous trips to Tucson. We
decided that Kim would ride lead and I would tell him our next move via the
communicators. It was a good plan and
was working well until I realized the GPS wanted us to take I-10 and we didn’t
want to take I-10. So, as I’ve been
known to do, I disregarded its directions and we did our own thing. Got to the dealership with no problem, where
we found the service department wasn’t open on Monday. However, a helpful young man found a clutch
lever, made the repair, and we were on our way. Back to the nav system….I still don’t get
sound on it even though the song cuts out when it tells me what to do next and
it seems there should be a way to have it avoid highways, tollways, etc. I really haven’t played with it before this
trip so it’s all new to me….I have some learning to do if we’re going to use it.
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We may have broken our rule about not
eating in fast food or chain restaurants today when we ate at a Mod Pizza for
lunch. However, we didn’t know that
until we got in the door. It had a Jimmy
Johns feel to it, but since we’ve never seen one before and we were hungry, we decided
to stay and eat. Besides we made up the
rules…we can bend them.
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| Tom Mix Monument |
After our clutch lever mission was
accomplished and our bellies got filled at Mod Pizza, it was time to head
back. Plenty of
routes to take and we chose north to 77, then 79 over to Florence. All told it was about 100 miles back to camp
by this route. We needed to be back before
the clubhouse closed for the evening (7 p.m.) so Kim could get online and update
a piece of equipment. 100 miles in 3 ½ hours….we
could do that. Hwy 79 was low to
moderately traveled, so it was a good route.
I saw a sign for the Tom Mix Monument and signaled to Kim that I wanted
to stop. Only thing I knew about Tom Mix
was that he was a cowboy actor, similar to Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. The monument piqued my interest when I read
that he was killed at ‘this spot’. Looked
it up and found this rather lengthy but informative on history.com:
This Day in History:
October 12
On this day in 1940,
cowboy-movie star Tom Mix is killed when he loses control of his speeding Cord
Phaeton convertible and rolls into a dry wash (now called the Tom Mix Wash)
near Florence, Arizona. He was 60 years old. Today, visitors to the site of the
accident can see a 2-foot–tall iron statue of a riderless horse and a somewhat
awkwardly written plaque that reads: “In memory of Tom Mix whose spirit left
his body on this spot and whose characterization and portrayals in life served
to better fix memories of the Old West in the minds of living men.”
According to Mix’s press agent, the star was a genuine cowboy and
swaggering hero of the Wild West: He was born in Texas; fought in the
Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Boer War; and served as a
sheriff in Kansas, a U.S. marshal in Oklahoma and a Texas Ranger. In fact, Mix
was born in Driftwood, Pennsylvania; deserted the Army in 1902; and was a drum
major in the Oklahoma Territorial Cavalry band when he went off to Hollywood in
1909.
None of these inconvenient facts prevented Mix from becoming one of the
greatest silent-film stars in history, however. Along with his famous horse
Tony, Mix made 370 full-length Westerns. At the peak of his fame, he was the
highest-paid actor in Hollywood, earning as much as $17,500 a week (about
$218,000 today). Unfortunately, Mix and Tony had a hard time making the
transition to talking pictures. Some people say that the actor’s voice was so
high-pitched that it undermined his macho cowboy image, but others argue that
sound films simply had too much talking for Mix’s taste: He preferred wild
action sequences to heartfelt conversation.
On the day he died, Mix was driving north from Tucson in his beloved
bright-yellow Cord Phaeton sports car. He was driving so fast that he didn’t
notice–or failed to heed–signs warning that one of the bridges was out on the
road ahead. The Phaeton swung into a gully and Mix was smacked in the back of
the head by one of the heavy aluminum suitcases he was carrying in the
convertible’s backseat. The impact broke the actor’s neck and he died almost
instantly. Today, the dented “Suitcase of Death” is the featured attraction at
the Tom Mix Museum in Dewey, Oklahoma.
So now I know a little bit more about
Tom Mix, silent film star. And now I
want to stop at his museum just to see the ‘Suitcase of Death”. J
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| Mystery bird |
At a stop for
pictures in the desert, I noticed a bird running around “OMGoodness! Is that a roadrunner?” was my
thought. However, upon looking it up
online, I’m not so sure. It had a
similar long tail that was held at an upward angle and the legs looked similar but
the coloring was different and there wasn’t a crest on his head. I’m going to look in a bird book in the
office tomorrow. Now that I know the
cookies are just piggies because they are, this is my new quest…what kind of
bird did I see?
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Rode about 145 miles
today
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