Those of you who have been following along may remember my great friend SH, who joined me for two weeks in the Yukon and Alaska in August. So soon, I've made it all the way down to her current place of residence: Tucson, AZ! She is in grad school at U of A, a campus I remember first seeing and finding very beautiful back when I was in high school. At that point I had only ever lived in WI, and I vividly remember my mind being blown by the wide-open, non-cold-or-rain-proof style of the campus buildings and set up. It's still gorgeous!
SH took me into the university's amazing tree ring research lab, where they have this completely incredible cross-section of a sequoia that lived for 1704 years before falling in 1915. This thing predates the founding of Istanbul (was Constantinople)!
No visit with SH is complete without hiking, and that we did in the western (Sonoran Desert) section of Saguaro National Park.
In addition to the (of course) saguaros, this part of the park also has some interesting preserved pictographs:
We ate very, very well while I was there, and I'm now going to think of Tucson in part as a city of great restaurants. But what might have made the biggest impression on me was the Native Seeds/SEARCH store, with all of its Southwest-specific offerings, including these fingernail-sized ordoño peppers…
…Agua Chiltepin, a germ-busting concoction made of water, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, garlic, chiltepin peppers, japans, thai and serrano peppers, ginger, lime juice, and natural spices--which I was not brave enough to try and which made even SH's Southwestern native eyes water…
…and the very yummy (I can personally attest) snack of parched corn: kernels baked in hot sand and then sifted out and sprayed with salted water. Mmmmm.
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