Scottsdale

Travel Day - Fort McDowell, AZ

I made the 103 mile drive from Sedona down to Fort McDowell, Arizona, which is just outside Scottsdale, in two hours. Somewhat surprisingly to me, I think this was the first drive I’ve had where I’ve actually been delayed in traffic. Thankfully it wasn’t much of a delay, probably only 15-20 minutes worth, but to be on the road for this long and not run in to any delays was a pretty good run. I expect this might get worse as I continue to drive between fairly large cities across the South to get back home. The campground is fairly decent, i.e. I actually have room to put out my awning, and I have a nice view of some mountains from the back of my campsite:

Tumacacori National Historical Park

Saturday, Sunday, and even most of Monday I didn’t do much besides watch football and read. It was 105 during the days, so getting out to do any hiking or exploring the city just wasn’t in the cards for me. Tuesday I finally decided to go see some of the national parks in the area, starting with Tumacacori, which was an interesting mix of Native Americans and Spanish missionaries. At one point it was a fairly large village with a large orchard attached. The orchard is still there, but most of the village has just foundations remaining, except for the church the missionaries had built:

It was nice because they had a self guided tour that had info about the whole village, and talked about what each of the buildings were likely for at the time.

Saguaro National Park

A saguaro (suh-waa-row) is the classic cactus that I think about when I think about Arizona, so a whole park of them was awesome to see. There are hundreds just in this one picture:

The park also had mountains in the background so it was a beautiful place to drive around:

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument

This was an interesting place that unfortunately I didn’t get to until shortly before closing, so I had to rush through it a bit. This was at one time a village as well, and not much is left of the village except for one central building, which now has a large roof structure to help protect it:

There are several things that make this so interesting to me, first is that archeologists don’t know what this building was for. Pretty much everywhere else I’ve seen they at least have a guess as to what the building or room was for. The next thing that makes it interesting is the walls of this structure line up exactly north-south-east-west. Finally, there are some special windows on this building: Towards the top on the far left side is a small windows that lines up exactly with the sunset on the summer solstice. Towards the top on the right is a small windows that lines up with the moon during the lunar standstill (aka lunistice), which only occurs once every 18.6 years. There were two more windows on the top of the other side of the building that line of with the sun rise on the spring and fall equinoxes.

Michigan

Wednesday was an errands day, I had to get another oil change, do laundry, etc., because on Thursday I was flying up to Michigan for my cousin’s wedding. It was great to see all my family again, and Sam and Ally had a beautiful and very fun wedding, congrats to them! It was also nice to get a little break from the 100+ degree weather and get a little taste of fall.

Tonto National Monument

I got back into Arizona Sunday. Monday I went to Tonto National Monument, which is another cliffside dwelling: What I found most impressive about this one was the amazing view out their “front door”: