179 popped out back on I17 a little ways north of Phoenix and I took that into town to Shelly and Mike's place. Shelly is my cousin. She married Mike and they now live with their 5 kids (yeah, no kidding, 5 kids) in a neighborhood filled with Mike's siblings. I think he said he had 9 siblings and 5 of them lived nearby. They all have a bunch of kids and there are some other families nearby with lots of kids. Quite the neighborhood to grow up in I would think.
Joel (another cousin) was also there. He is Shelly's brother and is staying with them for a bit. We all went out to lunch at a really good Mexican place (can't remember the name) where Mike joined us. The two youngest kids came with, the other's were in school. Laurel (yet another cousin) came by the restaurant to drop off her two kids for Shelly to watch while she went to some appointment or meeting or something. It was pretty quick but it was still nice to see her.
Of course, I forgot to take pictures of any of this. I've been really bad about that recently. For some reason I always forget to take pictures of people. Places I've been pretty good with, but I think I'm only getting about 50% of the people I'm seeing. I'll try harder for the rest of the trip, I promise.
From there I went to meet Mary at a coffee shop. In retrospect I realized that Mary and Joel went to school together at the University of Dallas and Shelly went there a couple years earlier. I should have invited them along but didn't think about it until it was too late. Anyway, Mary and I went to high school together. There were only three of us in the graduating class of 2000. David, the guy I met in Seattle with the cute little 2 year old girl was the other one. So this was our 10 year reunion, split between two cities. Nice, eh?
So Mary came to meet me at the coffee place with her husband, Luke and two kids. We got caught up on what everyone has been doing and reminisced a bit about high school. One of the better stories that came up was the time that we were all crammed into Mary's mom's big blue Suburban. There were probably 10 or 12 of us in the carpool coming home from school talking about funny bumper stickers. As we came up to a stop sign there was a beat up old car in front of us just plastered with them so we all started to read them. The first one we all saw was right in the middle in big, block letters and read "Sex can wait, masturbate". Naturally we all started busting up but Mrs. Baird (Mary's mom who was VERY conservative and religious) was not at all amused and tried to cover the eyes of her youngest (Madeleine) yelling "No, Madeleine! Don't look!!" Those were the days. Naturally that wasn't the only thing we talked about but I think it was the funniest.
Here's Mary, Luke and their two kids. Sadly, I can't remember their names but the boy is 4 and the girl is 18 months. I'm just happy I remembered to take a picture, even if it is clearly posed.
Just so you know, Phoenix is hot. So is Tucson. I think I was a bit dehydrated overall so I started going back to my standard of getting either water or Gatorade at every stop. Water, water, Gatorade, water, water, Gatorade. I remember them telling us to do that when I was in Iraq and it's worked for me earlier in the trip, like when I was going through Nebraska, the hottest most miserable state I've yet to go through. Now that I'm in the southwest I have to remember to keep that up again.
After leaving Phoenix, I took I10 through Tucson to highway 90 which took me south to Sierra Vista, my old stomping grounds near Ft. Huachuca where I was stationed for about 6 months back in my Army days. My friend Caroline is there for some training (it's a training base mostly). I got to Caroline's place at about 8 and after catching up for a bit, I crashed and got some sleep.
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