Travel Letters To Home

Travel Letter # 3

Saturday, 1/3/04

Welcome to our third vacation form letter. It will be our final vacation letter, because we live in Tucson now, and we're going job-hunting today. I think this, then, is no longer technically a vacation, even if it still feels like it. We are including our new address.

To bring you all up to date: A moment after I finished writing our last letter, I broke Ana's finger. We had intended to relax for a few more days at the hot springs, but with Ana screaming in pain, and remembering my minutes-old comment about avoiding all the doctors in Safford, we decided to move to Tucson, and spend our health-care dollars there.

A couple hours later we were in a Tucson motel room, looking through the yellow pages for a doctor or clinic. Eventually we gave up and I cut up my sleeping pad to make a brace for Ana's finger. This saved us hundreds of dollars, which was good, because we needed the money twelve hours later for new ball joints on the van. Ana is such a good sport, even when in extreme pain. Maybe we'll get an x-ray someday, to see how well my splint worked.

With new ball joints that sounded suspiciously noisy, just like the old ones, we explored Tucson. We found a flea market with 500 vendors, where we bought a new sweater for a dollar. We ate again at the Guatamalan restaurant. We watched the news every night, to see if there were more accidents on "Roller Coaster Road." (I'm not maing this up.) I redesigned Ana's splint three times, and we went swimming outside on Christmas.

It was colder here than in Anchorage, Alaska one morning: 19 degrees. By afternoon it was in the 50s. Avoiding winter here consists of sleeping in, so we've been practicing.

After Christmas we cruised town telling landlords we wanted to rent their apartments without a lease or a job. One nice manager said okay when I promised to get a job eventually. Now we live in a nice, clean apartment in a safe part of town, with a bus stop thirty feet away, and malls, bars, and banks all within a few blocks. All this for $360 per month, which convinced us that we don't want to be landlords here.

We bought a bed, shower curtain, cutting board, and knife for a total of $13. Then, with our usual good luck, a neighbor died, and we inherited a chair, a dresser, two tables, two rugs, a lamp and an alarm clock. We weren't sure how he died or where, so when the manager offered us the stinky couch, we passed on it.

There are a lot of homeless people living in Tucson. I suggested we watch to see what kind of alcohol an old man would buy with the help of our 50 cents. Cigarettes, as it turns out, but that was enough for Ana to decide that we'll never give money to beggars again.

On New Years Eve we walked the four blocks to Famous Sams, where the beer made the karaoke bearable. The champagne was the worst I'd ever tasted ( I had three, just to be sure). Ana had a paper crown for a souvenir, and I got a hangover.

Well, Tucson is great, but I'm running out of paper. I better go get a job to buy more. Adios,