The Three C's - Copper, Cotton and Cattle

Well, what can I tell you about Phoenix except that I don't need to come back.  It is a huge, sprawling place of freeways and malls and tract houses, interspersed, I am  sure, with some lovely suburbs, but who cares?  

Not that the day was wasted, however.  Hank took me out to Gila Bend, and the ranch where he grew up, about 1 1/2 hours out of town.  Some roots!

The ranch is on a road subsequently named after it, Poco Dinero Road - for the uninitiated, that means "little money" in Spanish, although the truth is that Hank's father had 72 square miles of grazing land, although some of it was leased out to him  by the Bureau of Land Management.

The ranch is that way....

And yes, you read it right, it does not say "Private Road" as I had originally thought, it says "primitive road", and it was that (although I have seen worse).  And there, two miles in, was the ranch itself, apparently somewhat changed but totally recognizable, says Hank (partially, I am  sure, because there is nothing else for miles.  And no, we did not get out of the car to take picturs.  It definitely looked like the kind of place where someone might come out of the door with a shotgun if you did that.....

So, is it true that you can take the boy out of the ranch but you can't take the ranch out of the boy?

On the way back to town, we saw a local historical site, the petroglyphs.

What can I tell you?  You had to be there....

And then there was the town...

One thousand seven hundred friendly people and five old crabs!  Hank tells me that they now vote on who the five crabs are!

Hank goes back to his old elementary school, now administrative offices for the school district, and although he does not find his high school picture on the wall, he does find pictures of other friends (Kathleen, that's you) and a candid shot of Hank and his arch rival in school!  What a trip (in the slangy sense of the word!).

And then he revisits his first job, gas jockey at the one station, owned by the father of a classmate.  Ah, the joys of small towns!

There is, of course, the obligatory cactus...

The town is not dying, though,.  It has not lost and may even have gained in population, Prince Harry was apparently seen in the local Italian restaurant (something to do with his military training here, don't you know), there are two huge solar facilities being constructed just outside of the town itself, still very much alive.

We failed to rustle up any of Hank's old friends (one of whom  was the mayor, but apparntly city hall is closed on Saturday), but did have lunch in the "Space Age Diner"  (no joke!).

And then there are the prarie skies!  The sunset wasn't spectacular, but I will try again tomorrow!  Hank very much enjoyed sharing this with me, and I loved getting to know his past, although I have to say, how he got from  there to here is still somewhat of a mystery, although it probably just boils down to "how are you going to keep them  down on the farm (or in this case, the ranch) once they have seen Paree (or, in this case, San Francisco).

Up tomorrow is, of course, the family wedding which was the pretext for this whole trip.  News at 11!