Weekend Escape: Tucson, Arizona : Two people pack in a lot of desert for a little money

We wanted to get out to the desert. Usually that means just driving east, but an interesting arithmetic had presented itself. The round-trip fare to Tucson for two people, with tax, was $158 on Morris Air, thanks to an accompanying passenger discount. (Morris has since been bought by Southwest Airlines, which offers a similar round-trip for two for about $120.) Budget offered people showing airline tickets a special weekend rate of $20.50 per day on larger-than-juice-can rental cars. The hotel rate season had conveniently shifted from peak to shoulder. The bottom line was wings, wheels and a bed for three nights away for two people in Tucson for about $400. So we went to visit the saguaros, and wound up very pleased we had.

We were on the 7:30 a.m. flight on Friday morning out of LAX, and by 10:30 we were driving west on the Ajo highway under a glorious sun. The teal-green Ford Escort was a little underpowered, but it had enthusiastic air conditioning and a surprisingly good sound system--and we had brought a case of cassettes. The surprisingly lush--at least, to eyes accustomed to the much drier Colorado and Mojave deserts--countryside slid away as Vivaldi gave way to Best O’Boingo.

Our feeling of well-being was momentarily jarred when we pulled into the packed parking lot of Old Tucson, a western movie set turned theme park. This was, we realized instantaneously, not what we had left Los Angeles to visit. We 180ed at the gate and, 1 1/2 Boingo tunes later, we were parked at the nearby Desert Museum.

It calls itself a museum, but it is equally an ingeniously designed zoo and a beautifully landscaped botanical garden that aims to be a complete introduction to the geology, ecology and history of the Sonora Desert. The park immediately endeared itself to one hungry and caffeine - addicted traveler with excellent varietal coffee and gigantic scones at its coffee shop ($5 for two), and subsequently confirmed its good impression with a much-better-than-institutional late lunch ($11) of chicken tacos and fruit salad at its restaurant.

We took the long way back to the city, winding across the desert in a broad loop that took us past miles of cactus before putting back on the freeway. We exited and cruised for miles on the endless commercial strip called Speedway Boulevard to the Smuggler’s Inn, a $55-a-night, plus tax, semi-famous motel we had picked out of the AAA handbook. (Current high season rates are $110 but revert to summer rates again in May.) The rooms were vast, frigidly air-conditioned and clean, and both the New York and Los Angeles Times were on sale in the lobby. Three hours later, we were back in the car, heading for Fourth Avenue, Tucson’s Westwood/Santa Monica Promenade/Pasadena Old Town.

Not quite: Most of the stores had closed by 6 on a Friday evening. We window-shopped our way down the street and around to the Congress Hotel, the richly seedy relic of Tucson’s days as a railroad town that now functions as an unofficial downtown cultural center. There we learned that we were just a day early: Tomorrow night was a Tucson Downtown Saturday Night, a twice-monthly street fair when everything would be open. The next morning was for cactus: We loaded the car with fruit we had bought the day before and headed out to the eastern segment of Saguaro National Monument. The saguaro is the icon and emblem of Arizona, a shape utterly its own, instantly recognizable, a set of endlessly diverting variations on the theme of the plump central stalk, 15 or 20 feet high plus arms, which begin to grow when the plant is 50 or so years old. The effect is simultaneously dignified and playful, majestic and ironic.

The eastern half of the monument is less visited than the west, which contains the Desert Museum. A circular road runs around the periphery of the park, surrounding a maze of hiking trails. The weather was perfect for walking; a peaceful and benign 80 degrees with just a hint of breeze. Three hours and several hundred saguaro later, we were back in the car, spiritually lifted, and we headed south, driving a long leisurely loop through pretty desert, wooded valleys, past the ranch towns of Sonoita and Patagonia, almost all the way down to the Mexican border at Nogales, then back north to the National Historical Park at Tumacacori.

We were by this time famished, notwithstanding the bread and fruit we had brought. Fortunately, directly opposite the park the Tumacacori Restaurant was flying the blue and white stripes of Greece, offering Greek salad, gyros, moussaka and baklava, along with burros and chimichangas.

We enthusiastically dived in ($18) and, much refreshed, toured the ruins of the old mission (founded 1691; structure built a century later) under the informative guidance of an endlessly enthusiastic bilingual guide named Tim who paused under the vault of the sanctuary to render a segment of the Mass in a sweet, true tenor.

Five miles north of the mission is the arts and crafts colony of Tubac, 100 or so shops in adobe buildings, roughly 80 of them offering dream catchers--the feathered, circular ornaments ubiquitous in southern Arizona--the rest an assortment of (to us) unimpressive arts and crafts. We did like a big terra-cotta Mexican planter in the shape of a chicken, which we bought on an honor system from a closed store, slipping a check for the amount plus sales tax through the mail slot.

Back in Tucson, we bought Los Angeles and New York papers, and retired to recharge batteries. By 7 we were ready for the street fair. We arrived downtown to find half of Tucson milling happily through the streets; bola-tied, sun-baked old - line ‘Zonies, kids dutifully answering fashion’s call to swelter in Northwest grunge outfits, Bermuda-shorted snowbirds, big Latino families and a hell-and-brimstone evangelist with a much too powerful sound system. The street scene moved into the music scene. A group of clubs downtown, in connection with the excellent local free weekly newspaper were offering a $5 pass, good at 10 nearby live music venues, each one featuring a different genre of sounds.

Rousing ourselves the next morning, we drove up toward the foothills to the Tohono Chul desert preserve, a 37-acre island in the city, containing a botanical garden, an art gallery, a bookstore and, finally, a tea room with a locally famous brunch, $19 for two, served outdoors under a mesquite tree, as hummingbirds buzzed and whirred past us. We lingered over coffee and then made our leisurely way back through the gallery (an exhibit of some remarkable 50-year-old quilts), and then back through the twisting, lovingly cared for trails of the preserve.

A ticket-pricing glitch had made it cheaper to pay for another night in the motel than to fly back Sunday night. We spent the afternoon at the University of Arizona, and went to the mission at San Xavier del Bac, a well-ornamented and pretty 18th-Century church of the kind you’ll find in a thousand Mexican towns. And then we went to have a blowout meal. As the sun went down, we drove up into the hills to the Loew’s Ventana Canyon Resort, an attractive jumble of glass and steel neatly wedged between clumps of enormous saguaros at the mouth of a canyon, fronting a swimming pool that seemed the size of Lake Michigan. The Ventana Room here, looking down over the valley was supposed to serve good food, and it actually surpassed the reports, from the venison carpaccio through the herbed duck. It cost $136, including the Veuve Clicquot and the unimprovable service, and was eminently worth every penny.

The plane was early the next morning. At 8:15 a.m. we were back in Los Angeles; that morning, we were both at work. Sure, we’d go back.

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Budget for Two

LAX-Tucson round-trip plane tickets for two: $153.00

Smuggler’s Inn, 3 nights with AAA discount: 199.35

Car rental, air travelers’ rate: 70.82

Gas: 10.87

Parking, LAX: 24.00

Parks, museums, clubs: 32.00

Ventana Room dinner: 132.61

All other food: 108.00

TOTAL: $730.65

Smuggler’s Inn, 6350 E. Speedway, Tucson, Ariz. 85710; tel. (800) 525-8852, fax (602) 722-3713.