Harry Travels: Negative News Is Good News

January 14-20

My last dispatch ended on the 13th, so we were still in quarantine in Riverside.

It’s not a bad place to be isolated. You’re not going to miss anything.

We ate a lot of takeout from Big Skyy across the street.

The day we got the news that we were positive, we had planned to go to a branch of The Spaghetti Factory. I thought it might be worth a try. We may have gone to one in upstate New York some time ago, but I’m not sure.

Anyhow, that didn’t work out, because we went straight back to the Quality Inn for some takeout closer to home.

The end of our fifth day, though, we decided to venture out, and we drove over to The Spaghetti Factory, after all. It was better than New York Pizza in Riverside, but not so much better that I’d recommend another trip there.

The sausage had no flavor of fennel or sage. The wine was OK. The sauce was meaty, but also a little sweet. Definitely edible, but that’s about all there is to say about it.

The next morning, the 15th, we started heading east. We’ve been keeping highway drives to three hours or so between stops. So we went back to Blythe, still in California but very close to the Arizona state line.

We had enough of California. So I had tried to get us into Quartzsite, Arizona, but that’s one hell of a popular place. It was booked solid.

We went to a Sizzler Steakhouse for dinner at Blythe. It was the only place in town that looked promising. We had tried Steaks and Cakes during our previous stop in town, and I wan’t in the mood for more gristle.

When I walked into Sizzler, I had a bit of culture shock. You order the way you do at a fast food joint.

But it was better than that. We had a couple of sirloins with some house red. Not great, but good, and the price was light.

We were back in Scottsdale Sunday afternoon, the 16th. We finally got a chance to do the laundry.

Food is good in this town. We went back to Barrio Queen twice. Joanna loves a broiled fish dish they serve. I tried tamales one night, and they were good, but even better was the second time, a trio of enchiladas in three kinds of mole: red, black, and green.

I’ll have that the next time I visit the Queen.

We went back to the Grapevine one other night, and Joanna even tried pizza at Grimaldi’s.

But we hit town on a low note. We were still running symptoms, an occasional cough and nasal congestion.

I tried to book us for tests. No openings anywhere and no help finding any online. You ask about tests, get 20 locations, and for each one you have to click day by day to learn there are no openings.

Apparently they can’t write code that will give you a hint.

We went to Walgreen’s Monday morning and got a real surprise.

We had been to several drug stores, and saw signs that over-the-counter tests were sold out. Many of the signs showed marks of age.

This morning, though, Walgreen’s was in stock in a big way. We were limited to four at a time. Joanna bought two and I bought three.

We waited till Tuesday morning to try the test. Damn it, but they both turned up the single blue line. Just like that. We were covid-free and good to get boosters.

Patrick had sent me a connection to Albertson’s, where his family got their shots, and it worked perfectly.

We managed to land appointments for Wednesday morning

We were feeling so great that we went out to take a walk in the Desert Botanical Garden.

We sat on a bench among spikey and palmy things looking like props for “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Dale Chihuly, the artist who works in glass and was featured in the museum in Oklahoma City, has done a number of works that are integrated with the garden.

We got our shots on time. And took it easy for the afternoon before we went back to Barrio Queen.

Thursday, the 20th, we took off for the next leg of the journey to the east.

Instead of following I-10 to Tucson, we took U.S, 60 and 70 to a town called Safford. I’ve been reading a book about the Apache wars, and the route goes through the San Carlos Reservation. An early Arizona governor mentioned in the book is named Safford.

Part of U.S. 60 is known as the Superstition Freeway. Fans of old Westerns know about the Superstition Mountains and the Lost Dutchman Mine. This is ground zero for that legend.

There’s a sign for the Lost Dutchman State Park at Exit 196, so I had to take us in that direction.

The last reference we saw to the park, though, was another sign indicating a left turn from Idaho Road to a main thoroughfare called Apache Trail. Just about everything there is called Apache.

I don’t know how far we went on Apache Trail, but there was no more mention of a park of any kind.

Maybe that’s part of the joke. The Dutchman Park, like the Dutchman Mine, is lost in the Superstition Mountains. Yes, there is a website for the park, but I’m still skeptical.