I am retired and have been fortunate to find a passion that keeps me active, mentally and physically. My wife and I travel around the country in our RV to volunteer in State Parks. We spend each winter in our mobile home (not an RV) in Tucson. My interest is in doing interpretive hosting on site, and my specialty is checking out local beliefs about local history/anthropology/geography etc. We leave Tucson next Saturday for at least three months of volunteering on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
Last fall, I saw an ad for part-time, on-call, jeep tour drivers. I get paid for each tour which lasts 3-4 hours from the time we pick up the tourists at their resort to the time we bring them back. In the 2 1/2 hours actually on a jeep trail, we explain the desert and I throw in a lot about the Apaches (Cochise and Geronimo) and the local geology. My job is to make the tours interesting for people with minimal interest in the desert. As a retired educator, I also try to give good information. Most of the tourists find that not only is it fun to bounce around in a jeep, they also learn something.
A few of the drivers just try to make it interesting so they get good tips. I'm the "nut" who insists that what I tell the tourists is true, not just local hearsay, both here on the jeep tours and at the state parks in the summers. I am continually checking what others tell me. I found this forum by doing a Google search for "John Wayne movies", to see for myself if the cactus story was true, embellished, or false.
Thanks to you good folks, the truth I have learned is more interesting than the fiction. I told of both cactus scenes yesterday and one of my passengers said Nevada Smith was one of his favorite movies. He was thrilled when I pointed out an Agave cactus to him.
Jeeptours