Arizona is the blue-hair capital of the world. And there are few places in the state old people like better than the Cracker Barrel, a chain of restaurants that combines shopping and food with a country theme. It’s a truck stop for seniors, without the knife display. You can put your name on the waiting list – there’s always a wait – then while away the hours, shopping for jams, inspirational cards that play music, or John Deere souvenirs. Best of all, you can sit outside on some of the furniture for sale and get yourself into a nice game of checkers. It’s for a slower pace, but they have good pie – so we bided our time, ate some breakfast, chased it with pie filling and set out south on the I-10 for Tucson, to the last big Arizona city before the Mexican border, and to baseball.

What we thought would be a nice 90-minute cruise through open Arizona land turned out to be a commute that gave witness to the sprawl that has taken over this area of the state. Experts claim that within a decade, Phoenix and Tucson will meet, creating a megapolitan area to rival any in the country. Planning and land purchases make this a sobering reality: Phoenix housing and urban development is already moving forward with a plan to go 60 miles south, and Tucson development will creep 40 miles to the north in the coming years, leaving a 20 mile gap between the two cities with just one freeway serving both communities.