This was about the time I was really really wishing I'd been a physicist. When Danek bought a brand new Passat and wanted to do a road trip, it seemed that the perfect thing to do was to drive from California down to Tucson and talk to some people at U of Arizona about working to become a grad student in astro. The details of that trip are not important (especially when I ran out of gas about 70 miles into a 90-mile stretch of highway without any gas stations)...

The most amazing thing about Arizona was the night sky. Tucson has laws about how much light pollution is allowed, and in the middle of the desert it was dark. I tried taking some pictures, but without any equipment, none of them showed up. But there were many globular clusters visible to the naked eye. And it was t-shirt weather all night.

Cacti. There were lots of these. They were really big.
...as evidenced by Danek posing in front of this one.
Sunset from the top of that ridge we were ascending.
That column in the middle is a miniature tornado. We watched quite a few of these form and then dissipate, leaving towers of dust in the wind.
Looking the other way, here's another lush and scrumptuous cactus field. Yummy!
Here we are, at the end of the trip, sitting on top of Skyline watching the best lightning storm I've ever seen. Sorry that this isn't centered; my reaction time was no doubt slowed by the fact that it was 4 in the morning at this point.