A Ride in the Desert

So I bailed on heading to Big Bend with the fellas this weekend mostly because I wasn't feeling 100% and the winds in the forecast were more then I wanted to risk. While I missed seeing friends in Texas, I decided to make the best of it today and rode the GT to Tucson to meet up with my pal Tanya who I spent the week in Europe with last fall. Since she was my Pillion last time I was on a GT, it seemed fitting that she would should be back on the back this run.


She forgot how much fun it was to put on a helmet again.


We left her house and headed out to Saguaro National Monument to get some more of the wildflowers. Tanya is an great on the bike because she "isn't there" when I am riding which is the best.


I gave her the little Nikon and told her to help snap some of the shots of the desert.


This may be the best picture ever of my right shoulder. The woman is a natural!


We decided that she would stay on the other side of the lens for a while.


The picture above this one was taken when Tanya was about 500 yards away up the hill. She did not run up there because I was cornering a little more aggressively on the GT. She just wanted to take a short run is all. After I talked her down, we proceeded at a relatively safe pace through the rest of the day


These flowers are just really cool









I just never get tired of the desert. It really is an amazing place


From there we rolled into the university district of Tucson for lunch. The town famous since the old west days is really now a major university town with some Aerospace and the Aircraft Bone yard being the other claim to fame there (that will be another ride tale later this spring).


We stopped to have lunch here at Gentle Ben's. I went to college in Tucson and the day brought back a flood of memories. One of them is that to this day, car alarms do not make me flinch. The parking lot next to the house I lived in was on the final approach to Davis Monthan Air force base and with a few squadrons of A-10's always flying back in the 80's car alarms would go off constantly.


So it was great to see that the more things changed the more they stayed the same. About 5 of these monsters flew over setting off several alarms


Tanya made friends with this little guy as we were leaving.


She still doesn't like that D-Ring but we had a hoot of a day.


Where to next I wonder?

Kaisr