Alexis Hartz, Author

What was I thinking? Today is the day. It’s a gorgeous fall day in Arizona. It’s 6am on a Friday morning and the highway traffic noise is already humming up through the neighborhood like a faulty air conditioning system. Sitting on the patio with coffee in hand, legs propped up on one of the southwestern carved chests Hank rescued from his last hotel’s renovation I consider again my plans for the day. Soon I’ll join the frenzied highway traffic heading south on the loop around the city, past the Buckeye exit and around the Estrella mountain range where the landscape and traffic clear. It’s a straight shot to Tucson from there, passing exits connected to pain points in my past. Still beautiful, but prickly like the cactus. Wild Horse Pass, Eloy, Picacho Peak National Park, Pinal Air Park, Tucson Outlet Stores, Saguaro National Park, and the Tucson exits to historic El Charro Café and the La Paloma Resort are all bookmarks to chapters of my Arizona life. Passing Tucson, I venture...

One really super great thing about road trips in the motor coach is seeing plenty of great scenery. Mountains, oceans, deserts, canyon lands, wide-open plains, I've seen them all.  Each landscape has its own majestic beauty. However, one of the best, most spectacular sights of all are the windmills sprouting up all over the nation. Equally as exciting are the solar panel farms that are sprouting up. Slowly but surely we are employing alternative energy sources. We may be totally unaware of our changing energy sources in the cities where we live, but this I know for sure --- we're moving in the right direction.