Trip Diary | Arcosanti, Arizona

by Maleeha Sambur

I've been wanting to get to Arcosanti for years, and when the opportunity presented itself in the form of a friend's Arizona wedding, my husband and I jumped at the chance to spend a night there. We arrived in pitch dark after turning off the highway and bumping along an unpaved, unlit road, dodging prickly-pear cacti at every turn, and praying our shoddy rental car would stay the course. The harrowing drive proved well worth it, however. Over the next 16 hours, we were treated to a a dazzling night sky speckled with stars, watched the sunrise from the beautiful Sky Suite (a concrete-and-glass dream), and toured the facilities while learning about the life's work of Arcosanti's founder, the visionary architect and urban designer Paolo Soleri.  

Trip Diary | Marfa, Texas

There is much to fall in love with in Marfa, and much of it has been written about ad nauseum - the unique, charmingly offbeat vibe of a remote little speck of a town with a lone stoplight, peopled (sparsely) with the friendliest folk, where tumbleweeds dance merrily across desert plains; the air of supernatural mystery surrounding the Marfa Lights; its history as a backdrop for John Wayne westerns; and of course, Donald Judd, the man whose artistic legacy has been intrinsically fused with the town since his arrival in the 1970s. 

Eager to immerse myself in all of this, I traveled to Marfa with my friends Sylvia and Jen in September of 2014. After flying into El Paso from our respective home cities - New York, Seattle, New Orleans - we crashed with Sylvia and Jen's parents (who happened to live there at the time) for the night. The next morning, we borrowed their car, filled up the gas tank, and embarked on a three hour drive through the flat expanse of West Texas. We were mostly alone on the road, save for the occasional  truck rumbling past, or the odd train snaking along in the distance, kicking up dust trails in its wake. We found ourselves enjoying an uninterrupted vista that was mostly sky, across which enormous white clouds gathered and rolled before our eyes, joining and separating in their own fluffy drama.  Thoroughly mesmerized by the cloud theater, the solitude of the open road, and the warmth of excellent company, my mind was suddenly light years from New York.