Day 1 Solomons, Maryland to Green Valley, Arizona

I’m not sure why we decided to take an extended five week trip to Arizona, but we did. The best excuse for doing this is because we've never been there. Not a very good reason, but the only one I can think of. The only plans we had were to spend the first two weeks in Green Valley, which is just south of Tucson, then head north to Scottsdale, Prescott, Sedona and the Grand Canyon in no particular order except that we wanted to spend Valentines day in the canyon.

Anyhow, we left Solomons at 5AM and arrived in Phoenix noon local time. The trip was uneventful with the exception that upon arriving at the Phoenix airport I decided that a beer was required before we picked up our bags. Naturally, by the time we got to the luggage carousel it was empty. After spending a few minutes looking stupidly at the empty spinning carousel, we managed to find our bags in the unclaimed baggage section. Who would have thought they would be that quick to get the bags off the plane? We then picked up our rental car, a Nissan Altima, and drove the two hours to our rented casita ( I have no idea what a casita is) in Green Valley and spent the rest of the day getting settled in and checking out the area…Arizona’s brown…everything’s brown…our rental car’s brown. The Green Valley area is made up entirely of old people, for which we qualify, that drive around (using the term loosely) just like in Naples Florida. We had dinner at a nice little Mexican restaurant called La Placita after which we headed back to our “casita” and crashed.