“A brace of hope / A pride of innocence / And you would say something has gone wrong.” – Toad The Wet Sprocket
At the very least something’s always wrong with Day 14. But I’ll come back to that in a bit.
We woke early and had a last, tasty, breakfast at the Embassy Suites – Paloma Village (Molly approves for your next visit to Tuscon). Our main destination for the day was Organ Pipe National Monument on the Mexican border in Southwest Arizona. Our original plan had been to do a pretty lengthy 10 mile hike there, but after yesterday’s summit of Wasson Peak and the 111 our thermometer read, we opted for an air conditioned hike around Ajo Mountain Drive in Fred. This was probably a mistake, but again, more on that in a bit.
The 21 mile loop through the heart of the Organ Pipe Cactus’ range in the U.S. was beautiful. We learned about lots of different plants that live there and the amazing adaptations they have developed to be able to survive in the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert. I think my favorite plant was probably the Teddy Bear Cholla which bears chain-fruit that can grab onto any passerby. Their fuzzy determination has allowed them to spread throughout the region.
After completing our tour we stopped by the ranger station, the girls picked up another junior ranger badge, and about a mile down the road after our departure the real adventure of the day began. Fred’s dashboard lit up with warnings, one of which I gathered was related to tire pressure. I switched over to his pressure display and saw our front driver’s side tire was down to 17 psi and falling. Fortunately, there was a place to pull over into the gravelly desert not much further down the road. Molly and I got out and immediately started working to resolve the problem.
It’s hard not to draw parallels to #RTXVII since the car related calamities both happened on day 14 of their respective trips. We recently reread our blog entries from this day last year and one of the things that stood out to Molly and I was how the police officers mentioned how well we were handling the situation. Although I don’t have any basis for comparison, I think they were probably right. Molly and I are generally pretty good at solving whatever problems come our way and we work well as a team. We had the spare tire, jack, and other tools ready in a few minutes. Before we even had the jack in place an “officer” of some sort pulled up in his unmarked pickup truck and turned on his flashing lights to help give us some cover from passing cars.
We were parked on loose gravel, and as we were raising the jack the surface gave out and Fred slipped off his jack. The “officer” produced a large notepad that we used as a base. After taking turns cranking the jack for a while we were able to pull the tire off and put on the spare with little trouble. The “officer” gave us directions to the NAPA garage in Ajo, a mere 30 or so miles away and offered to follow us most of the way there.
After arriving at the NAPA store we were directed to head around back to talk to Tom about getting the tire fixed. NAPA exec’s reading this post – Tom is a superstar, give him a raise! He was one of the friendliest and most helpful people we’ve encountered on all of our trips. He said he’d be able to have the tire patched in whatever time it took us to grab a quick bite to eat.
We headed to the coffee shop in the main Ajo town square and had some awesome sandwiches. I think a good sandwich is one of the most underrated and difficult to find foods in restaurants. So far Ajo wins for the best we’ve had this trip. By the time we returned to NAPA half an hour later Tom had the tire patched. He got it reattached to Fred and in no time we were back on the road.
We even made it to the Kimpton Palomar Phoenix for our first Kimpton wine hour of the trip. We also had a great dinner, and probably the best chef’s taste we’ve ever had at the Blue Hound. Hopefully tomorrow and the rest of the trip will bring us better luck with Fred, today’s snap was minor and with any luck the worst we’ll have to deal with this trip!
