Felicity, California has a real zip code and post office, but not very many people. It has maybe three people. The railroad tracks go right nearby, and there’s a strange pyramid. If you stand in the middle of the pyramid, you’re standing in the Center of the Earth. When attendants are around ( but not in 115 degree heat), you can get a certificate that says you stood in the Center of the Earth.

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As you walk around the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, you will love to take in the beautiful, panoramic overlooks of the desert. These alone are worth the price of admission. My favorite part of the museum is a trail that shows you how the land, plants and animals change as you go up a local mountain. At the bottom is the desert, but as you make your way up, you come across ponderosa, pine forest, and many other ecosystems.

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Percival Lowell Observatory by Jane St. Clair Percival Lowell had this pigheaded belief that intelligent creatures lived on Mars. Without his vision, we’d have lost a lot of great science fiction. What’s more, we wouldn’t have found Pluto. Percival Lowell was born into such a distinguished family that eventually they had a town named after […]

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The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has a Southern mansion from 1860 where Scarlett first encounters her Rhett. A Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A tenement building from the 1940s with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweet heart. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s. There are 500 of them,

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The Spirituality of Sunsetby Jane St. Clair As a young man, Abraham Lincoln took to walking around cemeteries at twilight. Now this sounds morbid to us, but back then, it was a very sexy thing to do. When you looked at a sunset in a vast horizon as you walked in a graveyard at twilight, […]

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There’s nothing to do in Winslow’s Standing on a Corner Park. It’s got no swings or seesaws or sandboxes. This park is about standing on the corner of old Route 66 and Kinsey Street. It’s a place to dream about a beautiful girl in a flatbed Ford.

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It’s easy to picture how Tumacacori once was so many years ago – serene, tranquil, beautiful — the active center of a small community in this isolated desert. And it is still beautiful in its own way.

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I could picture the Wells Fargo wagon a’coming down the street, and all of Mayer’s townspeople gathering at the Big Bug station – wondering if they got salmon from Seattle, a box of sugar maple or a cross-cut saw—the way we wonder what’s in the Amazon box on the porch. I could also picture the ladies of Mayer in their long dresses and corsets, living in the dust and heat of the Wild West.

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Since the desert is mostly dusty browns and a zillion shades of pastel greens, this means when the Palo Verde trees bloom, they are the whole show. The contrast of bright yellow flowers against the bright blue sky can be too much for human eyes to take in. No wonder Van Gogh went nuts.

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Desert Spaces by Jane St. Clair John Masefield wrote, “I must go down to the seas again to the lonely seas and the sky,” but you could say that about longing to go down to the desert again, to the lonely desert and sky. Something in me longs for desert spaces. I understand that you […]

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