Epic Road Trip 2016, Return to California (New Mexico & Arizona)

From El Paso we made the short trip up to Tucson, arriving about mid-day. We stopped in to see our friends the Tippies, (who recently moved here from California).  We took in the Titan Missile Museum and then had a great dinner with them, and spent part of the next day exploring downtown Tucson.

After lunch on the second day we drove to Phoenix, and met my cousin and her husband for dinner.  We stayed in Phoenix overnight, and went to Arcosanti in the morning. Arcosanti is an experimental community, built on the idea of combining Architecture with Ecology. It is about 60 miles north of the edge of Phoenix, built on a  beautiful mesa. A couple of pictures of the mesa:

There is some delicious irony in that the founder of Arcosanti wanted to develop a compact living style, ideally eliminating the need for urban sprawl by creating dense cities with lots of unspoiled open space around them.  Phoenix has sprawled to about 75 miles by 75 miles of rambling city...