I'm home. After yesterday's 750-mile drive, today's 470-mile drive should have felt relaxing. But it didn't. 

Still, we had some good experiences. From Sierra Vista we drove to nearby Fort Huachuca, got access passes for the Army base, and drove into Garden Canyon, one of the wildlife magnets on the base. We hiked up the canyon on a lovely morning. The brook was running briskly and gushing springs popped up on the side of the trail. However, a birding paradise, it was not. I got recordings of a couple of flycatchers that are rare in SoCal, and saw some Turkey Vultures, but that's about it for half an hour's effort. 

After we returned to the hotel and finished packing our gear, we headed for the Paton Center for Hummingbirds in Patagonia (the town, not the region).That was a fabulous place, with lots of close looks at multiple Broad-billed Hummingbirds and Violet-crowned Hummingbirds. We even saw a Northern Cardinal there, a bird that can be found in SoCal only with a lot of effort and luck. I got three "lifers," including the two hummingbirds that I mentioned plus a Gila Woodpecker. There are a couple of Towhee species there (Canyon and Abert's) that would have been lifers, too, but I couldn't find them. 

Fun stuff over, we headed for Tucson. The first part of the drive, on Hwy 83, was very pretty. If you're ever in the Tucson area, I recommend that drive and, of course, the Paton Center. You can get there in less than an hour.

my brother did all the driving in the morning. In Casa Grande, just before we got onto I-8, I took over and drove to Yuma while he napped. In Yuma he got his drug of choice, Starbucks, and drove the rest of the way back to his house in Orange County. I-8 is a really pretty route across the mountains to/from the desert. 

Particularly around Yuma but elsewhere on the drive, we kept passing RV parks that were a stone's throw, literally, from the interstate. There was one area well east of Yuma that had a collection of dozens of RVs on a patch of nondescript desert land next to the interstate. Nothing else - no infrastructure - just the RVs. I make two assumptions from these observations: (1) Snow must be a really bad thing, for the snowbirds to prefer to live in these conditions, or (2) Maybe these are the only form of housing some people can afford.