Best Escape In A Day
STAFF PICK: Tanque Verde Guest Ranch
IT'S ONE OF THOSE days when the city crushes. It closes in. One more car horn and your ears will crumble and fall off. Look, it's a dreamboat of a town we've got here, but some days you need out.The place we have in mind is close, yet far, far away. This jewel of a getaway is situated out where East Speedway's seemingly endless ride ends--out where the boulevard narrows to two lanes, the roadside is lined with mailboxes and the homes are set way back off the road, sometimes through cattle gates and at the end of long, dirt driveways.
At the spot where East Speedway ends, the road forks, and off to the left, up a winding dirt road lined with lumbering saguaros rising out of thickets of Sonoran desert brush is the Tanque Verde Guest Ranch.
It's for tourists, you think. But this place makes for a handsome, day-long retreat.
The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner. The atmosphere in the dining room is decidedly Western, but that doesn't mean the food is low-grade and one-dimensional. It isn't. The menu is varied, classy and good.
Then there are the meticulously kept grounds. Tall mesquites offer good shade, and the quiet is profound, just what you fled the city to find.
To complete the illusion of an escape greater than a few miles, there's the ever-present scent of horses, an aphrodisiac if you're in the right frame of mind. If not, just wait around until you hear the wooing whinny of a wrangler's mount. By then you'll be ready to get a room.
Another diversion of Tanque Verde is getting a gander at the tourists, a surprising number from Germany and Japan and England. They're there to experience the Old West as it was, and collect some gunfighter vibes.
If you wish to be viewed as a real exotic, hang around in the room by the front desk--which looks likes Ben Cartwright's digs--wearing cowboy boots and jeans and maybe a Stetson. When the tourists check in, they'll elbow one another and point over at you. You'll have made their day. You're what they came to see.
Never mind that your feet hurt from the boots squeezing your toes, and the Stetson is giving you hat-hair, and you're driving away in a Ford Taurus wagon with a cell phone on the front seat.
Hey, it's only for a day. The folks at Tanque Verde won't mind a bit.
--Leo Banks
