Voyage of Valdesca: a Drascombe longboat: Rollin', rollin', rollin', rawhide!

On Saturday, we started off from Santa Fe after an arctic freeze froze pipes and shut down gas lines all over New Mexico as temperatures plunged to -16 degrees. Neither of us wanted to load the boat in such cold weather. Day time temperatures were only 10 degrees for a couple days. There is so much tying down, requiring nimble fingers, we decided to wait until it warmed up again. Finally, on Friday, temperatures were in the high 20s and we got after it, loading and tying down in the course of the afternoon. So as not to repeat one of last year's mishaps, I CAREFULLY opened the car door to keep from breaking off the door handle. We rolled out the driveway at 9 AM Saturday, Tucson or bust.

Valdesca's on the move

The drive to Tucson is an easy 9 hours towing the boat, except that all the highway rest stops in New Mexico were closed due to frozen pipes. We pulled into Tucson at dark, exactly as planned. Coincidentally, we arrived right as Leo was doing the last steps in preparing his magnificent 40-clove garlic chicken. Chicken with roasted potatoes, salad, and red wine helped us settle into the new temperature regime--about 60 degrees warmer than New Mexico. We also had a good dose of cheesecake, which our house sitter Lori had made for my birthday. Duane (Lori's husband) had insisted we take it with us because he didn't want to eat it himself. Oh well! So now it's gone. We can get on with our lives.

Dinner in Tucson

On Sunday, Leo had more cooking to do. He and Leslie were invited to a Superbowl party and had decided to take 'golabki' (ga-WUMP-key), a stuffed cabbage dish beloved to Pennsylvanians. Apparently, it was a hit, though Tim and I stayed home and watched the Superbowl with the sound off. I read half of Steinbeck's 'The Pearl' in the time it took for the Packers to win. That, BTW, was the first Superbowl I have ever (sort of) watched.

Leo's golabki

Around noon, Leo had put the golabki in the oven, set the timer for two hours, and we drove out to Saguaro National Park for a hike. The day was gorgeous, sunny and warm, T-shirt weather. We stopped for sandwiches and ice tea, packed them in a backpack, and set off on a nice flat trail through the desert, surrounded on all sides by mesquite, palos verdes, prickly pear, cholla, and saguaros. In the course of our hike, we saw some curious sites.

First off, we saw an inordinate number of purple chollas and prickly pear. None of us knew whether the purple cactus were different varieties from the green ones. Google told me that this coloration is due to cold. While we had below-zero temperatures, it got down to 19 degrees in Tucson, an historic low. Most of the staghorn, buckhorn, and pencil cholla were bright purple yesterday. The Latin name of staghorn cholla is Opuntia versicolor, which apparently has a tendency to turn purple in the cold. Prickly pears in the park, and all over Tucson, are variegated green and purple right now. There is a purple prickly pear, Opuntia violaceae (var. Santa Rita), that is native to the Sonoran desert. The large leaf pads develop a purple tinge in the cool, dry winter months. So it appears that there are purple varieties of these cacti but their coloration is enhanced by cold temperatures.

Purple cane cholla

Saguaros sometimes grow in odd or misshapen forms. The growing tip occasionally produces a fan-like form or crest. Though these crested saguaros are somewhat rare, over 25 have been found within the boundaries of Saguaro National Park. Biologists disagree as to why some saguaros develop a crest. It may be a genetic mutation or the result of a lightning strike or freeze damage.