Flagstaff.

My cousin Kim and her husband Eddie are driving across the country in their RV. This seems to be a trend among friend and family, and it’s a trend I envy just a little bit. It’s been about a decade since we last saw Kim and Eddie. They reached out asking how far it was from Tucson to Flagstaff. It’s about a 4 1/2 hour drive, but it’d been so long since we’d seen each other, it was well worth the trip. I’m a big fan of Flagstaff. It has a very walkable downtown, there’s a nice mix of desert brown and some greenery, and the weather is much more moderate than what we experience in southern Arizona. The drive is fairly pleasant; we drove from Phoenix to Flagstaff along Interstate 17, which is atypical for a U.S. Interstate, in that it’s fairly curvy and hilly. The recently completed “Flex Lanes” made it easy to climb the steeper part of the drive. With Phoenix at around 1500 feet and Flagstaff at over 8600 feet, there’s plenty of scenery on the way up. The Jeep climbed the hills…