My thirst trip to USA
First, I will briefly describe how I got the visa. It was a time when visas were relatively easy to obtain. My daughter filled out all the necessary documents on the website of the US Embassy in Moscow. She sent me an invitation. We paid the state duty, and after a while a message arrived with the appointed day and time of the interview and fingerprinting at the embassy.
At the embassy, everything went quickly and I was given a visa for three years. Maybe it seems to me now that everything was easy, or maybe it helped that my children celebrated a decade of marriage at the end of October, and the invitation to this holiday was the motivation for my arrival and Americans are very respectful of family values.
Arizona’s roads are considered one of the best roads in America.
Part one, roads/cars and nature.
On Saturdays and Sundays, everyone is at home and there is a queue for the iPad. My grandson is allowed to play games on it only on weekends, so I am writing in the middle of the week. Today, Monday 17 November. We woke up at 6 o’clock, and it was +5 degrees outside, but now at 15:30 it is already +29.
About roads and cars.
On October 24 at 5 o’clock in the afternoon I flew to Los Angeles, in Russia it was already the 25th of the hour at 3 am. Our plane was delayed for one hour and it’s good that it was delayed, because my daughter and her husband came to meet me by car and traveled around Los Angeles for a very long time. traffic jams on the roads.
I passed passport control, I had hand luggage, on which for some reason they did not attach tags to me, and I also had to take my outerwear into a bag. I went out with two trunks without a single tag, at the exit to the city the customs officer said something to me (apparently on this occasion, or maybe he offered to take a cart), but he realized that there was nothing you could get from me, he waved and let me through. The road from California to Arizona by car takes about five hours, and it was the same amount of time to drive back. My brother-in-law was driving all the time (very hard, of course), but it’s even harder to drive in Los Angeles. The highway is multi-lane and all the time a moving traffic jam. Huge trucks with illuminated dimensions resemble a New Year’s clip, where they bring Pepsi-Cola and sing “the holiday is coming to us”. We arrived home late at night, beforehand we stopped at the friends of the children who had my grandson sleeping. They took him sleeping.
But in Arizona, roads are expensive to look at, they are considered one of the best roads in America. Interchanges, traffic lights, are empty, with no traffic jams. Of course, I did not go during rush hour, but I really like what I saw. And the cars are so huge that we have never seen them in Rostov. There are a lot of huge SUVs, cars like small trucks. Gasoline is now cheaper in Arizona, $2.72 a gallon. They often get cheaper in winter, because less of it is spent in the car for air cooling, and in summer the price rises. In the northern states, the opposite is true. Electricity in Arizona is also spent more on air conditioning in the summer than on heating in the winter.
Almost along all the roads, the right lane is cycling and there are a lot of people on bicycles, especially now in a non-hot period.
In the evening there are people walking with dogs, so they wear luminous cuffs on their arms and legs, even luminous vests on dogs. Where they live, there is no public transport and, of course, everyone is in cars, in houses for two or three cars, they don’t even walk to the store within ten minutes. In some places in the city, there is public transport, but in the summer, in the forty-degree heat, it is very difficult to wait for it at bus stops.
Road to Flagstaff
Highway exit
Road from Flagstaff
Bikers on Cave Creek Street
Part of the finished house transportation
Truck in the Rest Area parking lot
Rest Area
About nature and the area.
Cave Creek is the city we live in. It is part of the Phoenix metro area, is located on a plain in the Sanora Desert and is surrounded by small but picturesque mountains. For me, the concept of the desert was reduced to endless sands, but there is nothing like that here. Here the desert resembles our flat fields in the driest summer, with withered yellow grass. Only the soil is stony, like small pebbles, through which dry grass breaks through, all kinds of thorny bushes, cacti of various kinds and huge Saguaros. Saguaro is a cactus that is Arizona’s hallmark. It is even drawn on the numbers of Arizona license plates. Saguaros are very tall and branchy. I’m in love with them.
I used to think that it was solid pulp, but it turns out that it has a tree-like lattice frame. Birds make hollows in these cacti, and there are also bushes of terribly prickly cacti (solid spines), and there is a nest inside the bush. When we were driving to Las Vegas (this is already the state of Nevada), and so, with the departure from Arizona, the Saguaro ended, but it seemed that the same mountains, the same soil, the same thorny bushes and cacti.
When my daughter sent me photos, it seemed to me that the vegetation here is very poor, the houses are gloomy, but in reality everything looks much more interesting. Here, each terrain should be in a specific color scheme from light beige, light brown and pinkish brown. In Cave Creek, the houses and fences are a light halva color and are very in harmony with the color of the desert. The houses are fenced with massive fences, reminiscent of fences from films about Central Asia and the Middle East, apparently from desert animals. The desert here is literally next to the houses, you drive down the street, turn, already on one side is a wild desert. My son-in-law says that all these houses are made of boards and drywall, but they look like massive concrete houses. I was visiting one of these houses. We were invited by friends of the children, I really liked it. The house is two-storey with two exits. The entrance to the house, and the second exit to the backyard, and there is a garden, a playground for children, a grill, a fireplace in the yard and even an aviary for two dogs.
The city is very clean, there are a lot of flowering shrubs, there are cacti in which buds are tied, but I don’t know when they will bloom. There are many trees here, but they have very small leaves. In the park where my grandson and I went for a walk, I saw a mimosa tree, but the mimosa is not at all the same as they bring us from the south.
Her leaves are small, very small, and the flowers are much larger, but rare. On the street you can meet a coyote, of course, not in the center, but somewhere near the desert. They are treated like we treat stray dogs, they themselves are afraid of everyone.
