Oro Valley, Tucson

After our day spent being driven around Oro Valley by a real estate agent, my husband and I made jokes about vampires. We were sure that no one actually LIVES in Oro Valley. After all, we'd driven around all day and not seen more than one soul. It was April, after all, the one month in the year when it's actually mild enough for people to GO OUTDOORS- what a concept- in Tucson! And yet, in the whole day, in the neighborhoods of endless southwestern cookie cutter houses, we had only seen one man, walking his dog. At the shopping center we'd seen a few people. A lady who had just recently bought in Oro Valley kept repeating, "It's the up and coming place!" She said it with a sort of manic enthusiasm, her eyes bulging. Surely she was one of the vampires. She would join the others, who would come out at night from amongst washes, areas of natural vegetation that the developers leave empty because of flooding. You would catch glimpses of them from the giant windows of your perfect house with the granite kitchen counters. But you would never actually see them face to face until you tried to leave Oro Valley. Then they'd leap out and grab you and suck your blood!

Yes, my husband and I worked ourselves into quite a frenzy with our vampire imaginings that night. It started as a joke, a sort of relief from the spookiness of the day, but in the end, we wondered if it could actually be true...
Drive around and see for yourself the endless, endless blocks of empty houses.
The pretty part about this drive is the Santa Catalina Mountains towering above the town. They are lovely!
We left Oro Valley in a hurry, my husband and I, and decided not to buy a house in Tucson. Many Californians have fantasies of a cheaper lifestyle in Arizona. Some move, and of those, most leave Arizona after less than a year! It's a strange phenomenon that you won't hear about from real estate agents! Read more about this on our blog.

Oro Valley, Tucson

Directions

Comments