Alabama, Alaska, & Arizona

Alabama

Never been there. Got really, really close a few years ago when I was visiting my son at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi. I was delivering his truck to him to use while he was there. I had made good time driving out from LA and was actually going to drive past Biloxi to spend the night before he got in somewhere across the state line, just to be able to check Alabama off of my personal list. But once past the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge on I-10 an idiot light lit up on the dashboard and I decided to not push it. (It turned out to be no big thing, but I didn’t know that.) So, so Alabama. Yet.

Alaska

Haven’t ever been there, can’t wait to get there repeatedly in the future. I love hiking and camping and fishing and kayaking and wildlife watching and bird watching and whale watching and vivid landscapes and mountains and taking pictures of it all. I’m guessing that our first trip there will be a cruise. It might be one of the big ships for the first trip, but I’ve also heard great things about cruises on much smaller cruise ships, holding only a couple dozen passengers. Then we have to go back to take a railroad trip through the Rockies. Then we have to go back to see Juneau and Anchorage and Sitka and Ketchican and Kodiak. Then we have to go camping in Denali, of course! And we have to be there in the winter to see the Northern Lights! It’s a big state, I’ve got a lot of big things to see. Soon, I hope. Stand by, there might be pictures to share.

Arizona

I’ve obviously been to Arizona many, many times. Pictures from the Grand Canyon were posted here (ten sets!), along with pictures from Sedona and Route 89A.

I think that I first went to Arizona in about 1976 or 1977. I had moved to California a couple of years before, was in college at UC Irvine, and I had bought my first telescope. In order to get clear, dark skies, I took off toward the desert one summer week.

Young + Stupid = Trouble. I was driving an old, old Toyota Corona, which was fine around LA to get to school and work and back. But heading out into the Arizona desert in a fifteen year old commutermobile in July without getting the air conditioning and/or hoses and/or radiator checked… Anyone want to take a guess about how far I got before I was spraying rusty water all over the highway? Anyone?

Actually, the funniest memory of that disaster was the moment when the hose blew. I was just passing a big Greyhound bus when the windshield was covered in brown spray. My first thought was that the bus had vented its restroom onto my car. Um, no, that was the car’s lifeblood leaking away.

Overheating like crazy I managed to limp a few more miles before I found an abandoned garage in “Nowhere, AZ”. It really was. But there was a phone there, so a long, long (expensive) tow later I was having my sorry butt dragged into Prescott. Of course, in the mid-70s there weren’t a lot of places that could service or have parts for a Toyota, so I then got to spend three days there waiting.

That didn’t dissuade me. Since then there have been many other trips. The next summer I was back with my telescope (and a car that had been recently serviced) for my first trip to the Grand Canyon. In 1979 I went to my first Worldcon in Phoenix. When I was trying to get into a graduate program for astronomy, I went to Tucson to interview for their program. For several years my first wife lived in Lake Havasu, so the kids and I visited there at least a couple of times a year. We’ve gone there twice now for spring training with my beloved Angels. I’ve been to the Petrified Forest  National Park, Meteor Crater, and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

I don’t think I’ll ever settle down in Arizona (it’s a bit hot and a bit right-wing for my tastes), but it’s a great place to visit and given the right circumstances (i.e., getting a job offer there), I wouldn’t object to living there for a while.