Earlier this summer, Aimee, Stephanie, Ryan and I traveled down to Tucson to get out of town.  The heat was inescapable as Tucson has relatively the same temperature as Phoenix, but it does have an interesting artsy, indie, hippie culture which is an oasis in itself.  In the downtown fourth avenue area, we ate at a vegetarian restaurant with a morroccan theme for lunch, purused the books at a liberal bookstore, and drank coffee at a stand with a back patio.  I watched the three others pick up mesquite pods from the dirty sidewalk in front of where we parked; they intended to make flour from the pods, but Stephanie said they went bad after a couple of forgotten weeks in the car. We also picked up native Arizonan seeds from the Native Seed Search store.  We finished the day trip with a visit to a local coffee roaster where Aimee managed to talk the owner into buying all of our drinks, and we ate dinner at the Korean restaurant next door.  And we played “Hinky-Pinky” for about a full dirty hour on the return drive.