Cactus. Zombies.

Answer - drive to Sodona!

as if we needed a reason to get up and immediately start off on a mission!

... we hit Sodona by 7:15 ... turns out it was a little closer than we thought. Also turns out that nothing is open in Sodona until 8 or 9 or 10 ... even the visitor's center ... although, we harassed an employee who got there early (7:38) and got thew to let Meg in.

Breakfast of eggs Benedict was delicious, at the only joint open in town that looked decent. decent = not super overpriced for a cookie. $2.00 a cookie ... wtf? you can get a whole pack of cookies for that price. and it's a small cookie! not even a huge jumbo cookie. what's in it? gold dust? and if there is gold dust in it, that can slice up your esophagus and lead to heavy metal deposits in your system ... so there should be a warning on the label - just having the price set unreasonably high is not warning enough.

So - after deciding that there was nothing really to do, except wait to spend money, and after having realized that there wasn't much else to do as an option, and being too sluggy still to facilitate taking a hike in the surrounding hills, we drove.

towards a huge cactus reserve.

in the middle of southern AZ. a good four hours there, off the current route, to see some cacti.

okay - it was pretty sweet.

nice cacti.

look at the pics.

then another 6 hours to get back to the route.

... but through near death experiences.

Cliffton.

Cliffton.

Cliffton.

We saw people eating each other at mass gatherings. and hunters tracking tourists. and death traps to get passing vehicles. zombies. shotguns. no guardrails on a switchback mountain road. no signage. Tunnels with no lights on. mining roads with motorcycles coming on your side of the road. drive of death. we would have been next, but they'd obviously just caught someone. but really. we locked the doors. and kept the hammers at the ready. and drove as fast as possible out of there. even with the unmarked switchbacks, gaping holes in the road, and motorcycle cannibal hunters.

almost died later on. campground had huge bears, and wild cows, and people hiding in the woods with hatchets.

finally slept at Lyndon Lake.

no zombie crazies.

over two hours past where we had planned on stopping ... because no one felt safe enough sleeping anywhere we saw. empty campgrounds in the middle of nowhere with no camp hosts and trees rustling with no breeze ...