Back on the road --- in our Suzuki

As we may have mentioned, we are back on the road, but this time doing a car trip with assorted places to stay, such as MOTELS. Friday we boogied over to Tucson to meet friends for dinner at Pinnacle Peak steak house. Not just friends, but very good friends who happened to be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. They had also come to our celebration three weeks ago. There were twelve of us for dinner.

As is our habit, we arrived early and toured the setting for the restaurant, a tourist center called Trail Dust Town. The town was originally built to be a movie set in the 1940's, for a western starring Glen Ford. (No, kiddies, NOT Glenn Close!) At that time, this was on the outskirts of the small town called Tucson. Now it's in the middle of the hospital / medical office / laboratory center of the big city called Tucson.

Everything went well for Trail Dust Town until the 1970s when a fire destroyed nearly everything. The town was rebuilt on a different part of the same location, and today attracts thousands of tourists, most of whom will eat at Pinnacle Peak steak house. Here are some pictures we took of Trail Dust Town before everything opened at 5:00pm. More pictures can be found at our Trail Dust Town web album.





Inside the Pinnacle Peak restaurant, and for that matter everywhere nearby, the predominant aroma is mesquite fire! This is an old west steak house, of course, and that's how they cooked steak in the old west! Here's the young assistant chef showing off.

And since it is an old west steak house, no one is allowed to wear a necktie. If a man dares show up with a tie, it is promptly cut off and hung out to dry overhead. Every one of these ties has someone's name attached and the date is was taken. Trophies!

I suppose nowadays it is extraordinarily rare to catch anyone within miles of this place wearing a tie even to go to work! Any ties cut off these days have been worn in just for this purpose! (I did that years ago at the Pinnacle Peak steak house in Phoenix,)

After dinner, we completed our day's drive by moving west to Picacho Peak RV Resort, located at the base of (what else?) Picacho Peak.

Picacho Peak, seen above in the morning hours, has two distinguishing characteristics. (1) It's redundant. Picacho is Spanish for peak, so we're really saying "Peak Peak." (2) It has been a landmark forever, first among the native peoples who lived here ever so long ago, then the Spanish explorers, the European settlers, the mountain men, the Civil War soldiers (there was actually a Civil War "battle" nearby -- guns were fired and all that), and it still is a landmark even now. Picacho can be seen for at least 30 miles in most directions.

Saturday afternoon was the major anniversary celebration for Emerson and Carol. They had more of their family and friends gathered in the recreation room at the RV Resort. Carol and Emerson used to have a site across from us in Benson, but have recently purchased a Park Model at this resort. They had arranged for us, and some of their family members, to be able to rent other park models during our stay here.

A "park model" like this is similar to a "park trailer" like our home, but different in several ways. Primarily, our park trailer is a true RV. It sits on wheels and has an attached trailer tongue so that it can conceivably be towed along the nation's highways and byways. A park model is meant to be tied down to a single site, doesn't have to be "trailerable." A park trailer like ours has a size limit of 400 square feet; park models come in many sizes, smaller (like this one) or larger like many double-wides.

We'll show you a few pictures of Carol and Emerson's anniversary party next time you visit ... Our Life on Wheels.