Little House Big Desert

It was a wacky winter in Sandwich with recurring mud seasons and more rain than snow, but I only know this second hand because Todd, Rosie (woof) and I spent our first winter in Arizona since the 1990’s. Our little house in the big desert is a condo in Phoenix (hey, Phoenix is in the Sonoran Desert!) that we have owned and rented out since 2016. It’s not all that strange, really, since we lived in Arizona for seven years (working at a small boarding school on a 60,000 acre cattle ranch) and we lived in Colorado for a combined twenty-seven years. We fell in love with the desert Southwest, and now we’re jumping back in. We’re still New Hampshire residents, and we will most definitely be in Sandwich for the summer and fall. (We’re not crazy!) We miss sledding on our driveway, inhaling the maple steam from the sugar house, and of course we miss our New Hampshire friends and family, but Arizona is magical, too, and our Casita travel trailer (our little house on wheels) is very happy to be out and about year round!

Here’s a peek inside our Little House West. We did a lot of work on it in November and December…

Our Casita camping trips have included Lost Dutchman State Park in the Superstition Mountains (only 45 minutes from home!) Kartchner Caverns State Park southeast of Tucson, Organ Pipe National Monument on the Mexico border (yikes), Dead Horse State Park with glorious hiking in Sedona, and in April, we’ll be off to Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and Capitol Reef National Park, both in neighboring Utah.

Drawing us to Phoenix was its contrasts to Sandwich, New Hampshire. There are scorpions here… and rattlesnakes. (The photo at the top of the post is from a highway rest stop.) We can be at Trader Joe’s in five minutes. (I am positively giddy about this.) It is dry here (though the Sonoran Desert gets more rain than any other), and Phoenix is second only to Yuma as the sunniest place on earth. (This according to the page-turner, Awesome Arizona: 200 Amazing Facts About the Grand Canyon State… don’t get me started!) Did I mention that the Grand Canyon is in Arizona? There’s skiing in Arizona, like New Hampshire, but a ski day in Flagstaff could well be a golfing day in Phoenix. (Okay, who would want to go golfing? Well, the carts look like fun.) Todd hikes here regularly as he did during New Hampshire winters, but he can pop up Camelback Mountain or Piesta Peak (each about 5 minutes away) without crampons or snowshoes or his water bottle freezing. Is Phoenix better than Sandwich? Absolutely not, but we relish the contrast. (And there is the Trader Joe’s thing. Ummmmm, almond croissants.)

And finally, there’s a reason for spending time in Phoenix that anyone can understand. Our little California family is 2,500 miles closer when we’re in neighboring Arizona. They visited during baseball Spring Training. The San Francisco Giants are in the Cactus League, and their stadium is 15 minutes away in Scottsdale. More time with our grandson (and his parents, of course)? Priceless. We’ll be camping our way back to Sandwich in late April, arriving in the big woods on May 1, in time for lilacs, irises, and black flies. Exciting!