Tucson is a prickly delicacy wrapped in a warm tortilla and smothered in sunshine sauce. In December, we visited that arid nirvana with a chunk of my family. Delicious food was eaten, 150-year-old cacti were beheld, exceptional trails were hiked, and careless kids were spiked. Here’s how the piggings and the prickings went.

Tucson is the second-largest city in Arizona. It is encircled by five minor mountain ranges and a national park. Its bragging rights include being the first U.S. city to receive the title “City of Gastronomy” by UNESCO and boasting the southernmost ski resort in the United States. We wasted no time sampling its inimitable offerings intimately.

Jason went outside with some of the nieces and nephews to explore our first morning in Arizona. Within minutes, a nephew walked backwards into a jumping cholla, a barbed cactus known for attaching painfully onto anything near it. Although its hooks made removal more difficult than expected, Jason disconnected flesh from plant with skilled maneuvering.

After all those spikes were disconnected, we created opportunities for more stabbings with a hike in Saguaro National Park on portions of the Douglas Spring Trail, Converse Trail, and Garwood Trail- about 1.5 miles in total. Glorious desert!

Following our trek, we ate lunch at the humble looking but highly rated Baja Café. Yum! This restaurant is known for eggs benedicts and huevos rancheros. I got the Wyatt Earp, which is a grilled green chile and cheese tamale pie topped with tomatillo sauce, seared pulled pork, two strips of chipotle bacon, fire roasted green chilies, onions, tomatoes, melted cheddar and Monterey jack cheese, poached eggs, avocado hollandaise, pico de gallo, and cotija. If I didn’t just make you hungry with that run-on sentence, you may have no stomach for bad grammar. I’d highly recommend Baja Café, even if you prefer snickerdoodle pancakes to eggs benedict.

During the afternoon, we shopped at the Old Town Artisans, cute stores in downtown situated on the site of a fort built by the Spanish in 1775. Beyond offering distinctive handmade items, these shops contain remnants of original gold-leafed mouldings, wallpapers, and ceilings constructed from saguaro cactus ribs.

The next day, the wind picked up quite a bit. It made the mid-fifties feel more than 50% less hospitable. However, seeing as it was 20 degrees back home, you won’t catch me ungraciously complaining here. Despite the chilly breeze, we hiked about four miles through Sabino Canyon in a convoluted loop that jumped on a number of trails including parts of Esperero, Rattlesnake, and Bluff. These took us through cactus-covered hillsides and above Sabino Creek. Appearing like a vein diffusing golden blood, the land lining Sabino Creek was covered in deciduous trees just losing their fall leaves. This ordinary gilded stipe seemed almost alien surrounded by resilient saguaros.

We spent the afternoon at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Since large sections of this museum are located outside, the chilly wind plagued us still while we observed a load of desert critters including black widows, roadrunners, bobcats, and endangered Mexican gray wolves. We learned that there are over two dozen types of rattlesnakes in the Sonoran Desert. That’s a whole lot of rattling my nerves! The museum’s Cactus Garden is notable with over 100 types of these unique plants, including rare and endangered species like the Pima pineapple.

Our time in Tucson passed in a sunny, gusty, prickly, cheesy blast. The plates and landscapes were inspiring and the wind almost immobilizing.

This fall we spent a long weekend in Moab, like we have practically done since therapods pushed their toes into its scarlet mud. On this occasion, my sister joined us, and the weather was ideal, which made the trip exactly perfect.

Although November is one of our preferred months to visit Moab, conditions can be unpredictable that time of year. Fortunately, temperatures stayed in the sixties and skies remained sunny. Thank you, Gods of Not-Quite Winter!

How did we make use of all that delicious sunshine? First, we hiked the 2.5 miles to Longbow Arch, a trail we had somehow never explored or even heard of. Quite a few sights are packed into this short jaunt including petroglyphs, dinosaur tracks, and the obvious arch.

The next day, we trekked two trails, Cowboy Jacuzzis and Jeep Arch. Reaching the Cowboy Jacuzzis requires under a mile each way. Mill Creek slows as it fills these rock bowls, and sunshine striking the stone heats the water to bath temperatures… well, that’s what supposedly happens during warmer times of the year. It was cooler than any bath I’d like to dip into when we were there.

We visited Jeep Arch just a year ago, but since my sister had never been, we were disposed to enjoy this hike again. It was just as spectacular as the first time.

Our last day, we hiked somewhere between six and seven miles on the Amasa Back Trail with an added spur to an overlook above the Colorado River and Poison Spider Mesa. Amasa Back is a peninsula formed by a U-bend in the Colorado River. Its trail climbs to its crown. Rising 1000 feet has its advantages. At first, we were disappointed that our perspective on countless fins and dramatic cliffs from above the Colorado was marred by State Route 279 and other mementos of humanity. However, in the end, we found the ORVs and other Vs making their way up Poison Spider Mesa to be extremely entertaining, especially the unjustifiably confident ones. Our prospect also revealed the numerous layers of plateaus expanding above State Route 279 invisible from its pavement. An unfamiliar look on such a well-known motorway was fascinating.

What did we like about hiking Amasa Back? The vista from the viewpoint was unique and, surprisingly, made more interesting by its manmade touches. Also, we were able to appreciate this perspective in solitude. While the path had plenty of bikers on it until we passed the HyMasa Trail, a single-track used to access the Captain Ahab Trail, we didn’t see a single person the rest of our journey. What didn’t we like? Amasa Back is a jeep trail, which means a wider and more scuffed route.

It was great to share Moab with my sister and her hubby. Usually, it’s just me and Jason hogging the splendor to ourselves. Sunshine and sisters pair perfectly in the desert like cyanobacteria and lichens.

When you’ve taken a bunch of trips in quick succession, why not take another? Traveling to the Northwest has become a bit of a yearly tradition in my family, a ritual that continued this fall. This time, new members joined us, and like scenic meth, after just one time they might be hooked.

On this occasion, we stayed in Brookings, which is just over the Oregon border from California. It’s home to over 6,000 people and many more crabs. Brookings is in Oregon’s banana belt, a portion of the state’s coast that experiences more sunshine and warmer temperatures than surrounding areas. Tropical shores ahoy! We rented a beach house that could accommodate our large group, which was situated on a cove pebbled with some of the most brightly colored beach stones I’ve encountered.

We didn’t spend our first day walking on the shoreline though but crawling into the ground. A portion of our group drove about two hours inland to visit Oregon Caves National Monument. Oregon Caves was created by acidic water trickling through marble. It is one of only a few marble caves found in the United States. How often do you get to wander marble halls 220 feet inside a mountain? Yes, yes, I know subterranean marble chambers are old news to you dwarfs; no need to brag. We did an hour and a half tour of the cave that involved 500 stairs and 15,000 feet of passageways.

Since it was late in the fall, bats were starting to inhabit the cave in preparation for hibernation. We came across a few of those small and fluffy slumberers; they looked like snugglers not suckers.

The Ghost Room was the largest room we visited inside the cave. Although it extended several impressive stories, my favorite chamber was Paradise Lost with its flowstone drapery formations. It’s not often you find paradise in a dark, drippy cavern.

After a day inside the Earth, we decided to get a view of its upper decks by exploring the redwoods. Redwoods can be found not just in Redwoods National Park but also a series of state parks along the coast co-operated by the National Park Service. We traveled to one of these, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. There, we walked through Stout Memorial Grove and the connecting loops of the Simpson Reed Grove and Peterson Memorial Trails. These are short paths, but we moved so slow while peeping into holes and examining bark that those hikes took us from about 11:00 AM to around 5:00 PM. I won’t reveal our total mileage or calculate our MPH; it would just be depressing. While not far from each other, the two groves appeared quite different. Any gaps in the redwoods at the Simpson/Peterson area are filled with undergrowth trees while the ground at Stout is only occupied by sparse ferns due to regular flooding. Those distinctions were a graphic reminder that even the loftiest trees are still just pieces of complex ecosystems.

Our last day in Oregon, we took everything at a banana slug’s pace. A group of us walked to the beach to investigate a double sea arch as the tide was out and ended up exploring tidepools and rocks for an hour and a half. We saw a Dungeness crab, a purple shore crab, lots of hermit crabs, anemones, and something that looked like a sea cucumber.

After our extended time on the shore, we went shopping at a local antique store where we bought rings, military medals, and even a pipe… which we did not use for smoking anything in Oregon. We finished off the day and trip with a visit to Harris Beach State Park where mist turned Arch Rock and sandy stretches into mysterious silhouettes and enigmatic strands.

One advantage, and sometimes disadvantage, of traveling with family is a shortage of dull moments. In between all our sightseeing activities, we spent our evenings eating fish and playing poker. My dad gave the younger kids an introduction to poker, which went fairly well. I wouldn’t set them loose in Vegas though. Incidentally, for a small town, Brookings has some excellent seafood establishments.

Was Oregon’s banana belt all that a banana belt should be? We experienced equal proportions of mist and sunshine; that’s pretty decent for a coastline known for its foggy demeanor. Fruity vacations may be the way to go. I hear Delta’s kumquat belt is amazing.