Spring break did eventually come around, though, and I had cookin' plans of tasty wonder lain out ahead of me. Curry with Angie was to be my first excursion into the week's delightful foodly endeavors, but as I left my apartment I turned to see that the mountains to the east were covered with snow. I live in Tempe. Tempe is in Arizona. There is not snow in Tempe. That does not happen. I panicked for a moment and wondered how the hell I'd gotten to Nevada.

Like any manly man would do when confronted with such a baffling sight, I called my mother. Being someone who, unlike myself, watches the local news, she was able to inform me that there had been a decent amount of snow fall the last night, and I was probably still in Arizona.

Once Angie had seen the snow and we'd both finished geeking out, I said, "We're going, right?" We were going.

Road trip!

We'd kind of just planned to go to Flagstaff, which was a mere few hours north and covered in feet of snow, but that snow was not visible from our homes. That snow was supposed to be there. This snow was a magnificent, alien spectacle that had to be visited and poked with utmost diligence.

Others were called, and others turned us down with lame excuses like "I'm at work" or "I'm out of town". Come on.

We pointed my car at the mountains and started driving. Deep into the heart of dirty ol' Mesa and past Apache Junction we went, witnessing horrifying ordeals along the way. We drove by a street called Greasewood. An antique tractor and gas engine show called to us from the roadside, a deadly siren seeking to distract us from our most noble mission.

Mountains tend to be farther away than they look. We actually made it to the base of a rather large plateauish thing that had snow on its top, but the snow seemed rather inferior to the frosty white peaks in the distance and we continued on our way, driving into the Lost Dutchman State Park. I am told this is the name because there is, according to legend, a legendary gold deposit in the mountains called the Lost Dutchman's Mine. I suspect that the Dutchman himself may have, at one time, been lost as well.

We passed a decidedly unintimidating ghost town that was selling burro rides before ending up in a tiny outcropping of tourist traps (you can tell a place is a tourist trap when there is a man whose job is to have a mustache and take pictures with tourists while wearing cowboy pants) full of people and cars milling about behind a closed road sign. The road was closed because our beloved snow was melting. Immediate action was most necessary.

Two one lane bridges, one lake, and many near guttings of my low riding vehicle on narrow mountain roads later, we arrived. Pictures!