Oh, Arizona!

From everything I’d been reading at the time, Arizona was a Covid infested dystopian nightmare. And if there’s anything I don’t like, it’s Covid, infestations, and nightmares. And, to be honest, I’m not all that keen on dystopias outside of my fiction, either. But fate had brought me this close. What better time to dip my toe into the waters of the Grand Canyon State? I decided to grab the closest cache I could find to the border, about a mile into the state, and be happy with that. Except that cache involved some tiny road off the main highway and would have been one heck of a pain to get to, much less actually get, at night. I instead decided to get the easiest cache, and that would, no doubt, be the one at the first rest stop, about five miles in. I pulled off into it, far from the families and truckers and students moving, all of whom, as far as I was concerned, were carriers of the dreaded cholera. I slathered myself from head to toe with hand sanitizer (fine, fine, more like hand to wrist) and exited the car.

There was a bison tube magnetically attached to the back of the rest stop sign up there. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy (as they say in the parlance of our times). With trusty maglight in hand, I grabbed it, signed it, and returned it without the laughing world being any the wiser. I took what few photographs I needed as proof of my feat, and then reinserted myself back into the bubble of my automobile. Another application of sanitizer and I was off. My labors for the day were not only done, but a few steps beyond what I expected. Unfortunately, I had to drive miles into the state to find a turnaround so that I could head back and I encountered a couple of traffic snarling accidents, but I slipped the borders, hoping I would one day return when the specter of pestilence had risen from the land. Arizona only has 15 counties, but those county seats are spread out like you wouldn’t believe (or probably would totally believe if you looked at a map)! With time and patience, I was back in Deming, snug in bed for the night. Since I would not be starting there as originally planned, I was up and off before the sunrise, this time heading north. I would be greeting the new dawn in…