Yes, boys and girls, we retraced our previous route through Gila Bend (edited, because I was so tired I wrote the name of a different and neighboring town. Yeesh.) However, this time we stopped for breakfast with the aaaaaliens at the Space Age Restaurant!
This ain’t gonna be an arty-farty photo entry. I went almost 100% for kitsch and fun, though I do have a genuine mystery to wrap it up.
The sign told us it was open so we beamed aboard.
We were immediately greeted by our server. He was looking a little green around the gills, but we were still shown to a nice booth.
Incidentally, this batch is a mix of snaps from my phone and some from the “real” camera. I didn’t drag the Nikon into the restaurant.
This astronaut mural spanned the full wall above our table, from the front windows to the back wall. I probably should’ve taken a snap of the whole thing, but was too busy stuffing my face. The food was plentiful and yummy, if a bit slow on the delivery.
The high exposed rafters, liberal use of steel, and cool colors kept the vibe spacey. The shelf next to the door holds mugs and tchotchkes for sale. We were hoping to find a locale-specific postcard or two. Unfortunately they only had more generic “Arizona” postcards for sale.
We bumped into the server’s family on the way out:
If you ever drive through Gila Bend, Arizona, it’s worth a stop. They’re reasonably priced, too – we paid around $30 for the two of us, for more than either of us could eat.
Now for the mystery.
We were driving along some beautiful, if stark, rural scenery. In Arizona, that means mountains. In this case, old volcanic sites. These are old cinder cones, and one in particular caught my eye because the basalt vent rose above its surroundings.
The mountain itself wasn’t a mystery. Cool, but not a mystery. The cool part was spotting what I thought was a mountain lion winding its way through the rocks.
I fortunately had my Nikon and it was already set to continuous shots – as in, long as my finger stayed on the shutter button, it fired off a new photo every second or so.
Squirrel!
Maybe not. Remember, I thought it might be a mountain lion. It was BIG. I’m not talking about looking at it through my zoom lens, either. I saw it, jerked my camera back up, and started shooting again after I noticed it moving between the scrub. Most squirrels top out around 14 inches, too small to catch my eyes from so far away.
The terrain itself is another argument against a squirrel. This whole area was desert piñon pines. I can’t rule out a straggler, because there’s a canal across the road and there are farms in the general vicinity. It would still mean a squirrel strayed a long, long way from any kind of natural habitat.
On the other hand, I couldn’t find any other critter fitting the profile, so… squirrel? The Arizona gray squirrel can get to be 16-20 inches long and they’re known to be chonky. Maybe this is the Andre the Giant of Arizona gray squirrels. It’s still not the right habitat, but I can’t imagine what else it could be.
This is a wider angle of the ledge. I also thought it was cool to see petroglyphs on the rock face. I couldn’t see those until I opened up the full-size image and started looking for the climbing critter. I assume the bulk of the glyphs were written by an adult standing up, so the highest one of the cluster maybe four or five feet high from the ledge. With that in mind,16 to 20 inches is a reasonable estimate for the critter.
I couldn’t find any information online about the rock paintings/etchings. Then again, you really can’t SEE them from the road, so… maybe they’re not on any archaeologist’s radar? God knows stuff like that is all over Arizona, so maybe this site is remote enough it’s not all that interesting. Petroglyphs or not, no way in HELL I’d try to climb that mountain, even if I were able-bodied.
We kept driving, taking a more circuitous route than planned thanks to a detour. (I have artsy-fartsy photos from the trip, too, just haven’t finished processing them all.)
We drove to the Palo Verde power plant. It wasn’t a conscious destination, but when we realized we were in the vicinity, we decided we should drive close enough to take a look. We did look – from a distance. Neither of us felt like driving up to the gate of a nuclear facility was a bright idea.
Also not a good idea? Building a nuclear power plant near a volcanic field. Dormant, yes. Not extinct. Ugh.
I thought squirrel too but…….it seems really big.