Arizona Reflections

Arizona is a big state, and we didn't see nearly as much of it as we did Utah.  That being said, I will comment on what we saw.  We were not impressed with Arizona's roads.  The ones we were on were in pretty bad shape.  We were very unimpressed that Arizona has closed so many rest areas.  I know they have to do what they have to do because of economics, but it's too bad they couldn't work out something else.  Utah has worked out a deal with private businesses to act as rest areas and that system seems to work.  I know that on the stretch of I-40 that we were on (from Kingman to Williams) there weren't many businesses, so maybe that wouldn't work.  Idaho and Oregon had the best rest areas!

The presence of Native Americans trying to peddle goods at every corner and at every turnoff was annoying to us.  We saw this once in Utah on I-70 and the very next rest area/view point had a big sign saying "no soliciting" and we never saw it again.  I know they have to make a living and I give them credit for being enterprising, but this peddling was something we weren't familiar with or comfortable with.  In fact, it made us decide to skip stopping in Monument Valley other than what we saw from the highway and from our quick stop at Gouldings.  By the way, the road to Gouldings was the worst road we were on during our entire trip except for a couple of the gravel roads in Utah. 

It was disappointing that the Four Corners Monument was closed while we were there.  We drove in, didn't have to pay the $5, which was good since there was nothing to see except for booths selling stuff.  We won't hurry back to that area.  That part was officially in New Mexico so I won't blame Arizona for that!

In my opinion, Arizona is unfairly being boycotted by California for trying to crack down on illegals.  This boycott is ridiculous!  Maybe we should all boycott California?  Boycotts generally don't work anyway.  Arizona is doing the best it can and is trying to solve an unsolvable problem. 

Since Arizona is not on daylight-saving's time, sunrise came very early at 5:30 am and sunset came very early at 7:15 pm.  Our first night in Arizona was at the Grand Canyon and we wanted to go take our first look at the canyon, but we couldn't see much because it was already dark!  Cell phones are smart because they (eventually) automatically adjust themselves to the local time, but going from Utah to Las Vegas to Arizona and then back to Utah meant that we kept having to adjust our clocks and we never did understand when the network TV shows were on, so we finally gave up on watching network TV.  At one point we were still in Utah, but Dave's cell phone said we were on Central Time.  Huh??

The people we met in Arizona were friendly and very nice!  It seemed like another laid-back area, at least compared to here in Washington state and definitely laid-back compared to California where we lived for 17 years and where Dave lived his whole life until we moved to Washington. 

Wildflowers at Capital Reef National Park