Traveling for adventure in California and Arizona


Something that I've always enjoyed is traveling. My adult life has been spent in places with some of the most amazing scenery on earth, including Santa Barbara, California, and especially Arizona. Arizona is so beautiful that there's a popular magazine called "Arizona Highways" that people enjoy all over the world.

But most of the people I've ever met hate traveling. Now don't get me wrong, it isn't as if they walk up to me and grab me by the lapels and say, "Brad, I hate traveling!" but I can tell by what they do, and how they talk. I'll see if I can explain.

Most of the people that I talk to about going places have talked about how quickly they got there. They will say that they drove "12 hours straight" or something like that. And while I understand that to them I'm asking about their destination, I'm really not - I'm asking about what they saw, and did, along the way. That is, traveling.

But I do know people who enjoy traveling, and nowadays I call them my "history adventurers". For them, the adventure begins the moment they hit the road, or take their first step under those incredible Arizona skies. They see mountains, and scenery - the stuff that photographers take picture of for the magazine Arizona Highways. They see what people who are only concerned with destinations never really see.

And I understand that destinations matter. Sadly, what I found out when I started traveling from destination to destination that it all looked pretty much the same. All airports looked pretty much the same - I would go from a waiting room into another waiting room. People would ask me why I didn't like to travel, and they would miss the point. I travel every day, for adventure.

So if you ask me how quickly I got from Los Angeles to Phoenix in 1989, and I say that it took me three days, you may think that I'm joking. But I stopped along the way. I stopped in San Bernardino, I stopped in Palm Springs, I stopped in Indio. I rode the tramway to the top of San Jacinto Peak. And every time I've done that trip back and forth I've stopped at Desert Center, and climbed on the caboose. I've known a lot of people who drive all night, just staring at taillights and headlights. I've rarely heard of anyone who stops to admire the Milky Way, out in the desert, which is astonishing to see IRL (In Real Life).

Yeah, I know that I've been out of step with just about everyone else, going back to when I was a kid. And every once in a while I've tried to be "normal" - and then something catches my eye, or fires up my imagination, and I'm back to adventuring. If you want to try it, please come along with me, it's wonderful.

Image at the top of this post: At Desert Center in 2016.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please consider subscribing to History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more