Thursday

Thursday 16th November - the 4 Wheel Drive Day

Lesson for the day - do not trust out of date maps!

As Dave was still feeling slightly dodgy after Tuesday's jambalaya, the initial plan was to drive slowly down to Tucson along a few scenic roads.  The map showed part of the road as being "gravel highway" - no problem, as on a map of this scale that usually means a road that just about any car can drive down without any issues.

Our first clue that this road was a bit more rugged was when the woman at the visitor centre in the small town of Oracle asked us did we have a 4x4 vehicle?  We did, and started off along the 29 miles to Summerhaven.  However, as we carried on the road got rockier, the inclines got steeper, the drop-offs got greater and our speed got slower.  In the end, 29 miles took us the best part of 3 hours (including a 30 minute delay behind a herd of cattle being wrangled).

To reward ourselves at the end of the road, we caught the ski-lift even further up the mountains at Mt. Lemmon, and admired the view of Tucson in the haze, through the burnt out forest.  We then descended the 6000 ft back to Tucson, and checked in for the night.

Quote of the day (after a particularly scary bit of road) : "Kate, that laugh was more than a little bit hysterical".