Sunset, Sunrise, Cheese Curds, & Taxes
April 6 & 7, 2026 — Days 12 & 13
White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Waddell, AZ
Fiddler on the Roof got it wrong, it is Sunset, Sunrise.
April 9, 2026 — Day 15
We really try to avoid chain restaurants, both at home and on the road. But there are two out here that we really like to grab at least once. Culver’s and Pollo Loco. Here’s there’s a chain called Culvers. It’s fast food in the sense that you get in and out quickly. But it’s made to order and they bring it to the table. We both got the spicy chicken sandwich. Paul liked his a lot. Susan had had the regular version last year and tried for the spicy this year. Susan was not a fan! Those are fried cheese curds, they were pretty good but not the best we’ve eaten.
We’ve yet to see one in on these 15 miles that we almost always travel coming into Phoenix.
April 10, 2026 — Day 16
Today we bought a laser printer. For reasons not worth going into we couldn’t e-file this year.
(susan here: OK, most of you probably know by this point. When we got back from the wedding in November 2024 I had pneumonia. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem but we were on the road in April and I filed for an extension and paid the estimate of taxes due because some final forms hadn’t been issued when we left. And who wants to do taxes and who really really doesn’t want to do taxes on the road? *raises hand* I promptly forgot about it. Until April 2026 when the IRS wanted certain information so that we could e-file. I couldn’t find our tax return. See 2024 and my “amnesia”. Cue printer purchase.)
It would cost about $25-$50 in printing fees to use the printer in the Waddell Library (close by) to do both 2024 and 2025. We also needed a library card and it wasn’t clear they would give non-residents a library card. Susan found a cheap ink-jet at Staples that was about $50. Now Paul hates ink-jet printers. He made that abundantly clear early on in their relationship, after all, a long time romantic relationship hinges on printer technology, right? We’re at staples looking at it and we decided to Google around. It barely comes with enough ink to print 20 pages! But that’s ok, the 1st 3 months are free then you subscribe to ink. Yes, even ink is on subscription service after 3 months. That is going to work for us, like, never!
So we bought a Brother laser printer that is reasonably small and not terribly heavy. This is ok, we have one at home and it has been rock solid reliable, but it is at least 15, almost certainly 20 years old or older. It constantly complains about a mystery jam. And we could print wirelessly from our laptops! We’re reached the pinnacle of technology! But we needed to figure out how to join in on this gloriousness!
That’s the first part of the password for the printer. Paul photographed it, both halves actually, texted them to Susan, who read them off to Paul as he put that into his phone. He tried the laptop but it wouldn’t work. He was able to print from his phone.
He then asked Susan for PDFs of the IRS forms so he could print from his phone. She said, “Oh, I’ll just do that.” and Paul pointed out that getting to that point was, shall we say, challenging. She opted to air drop the files to Paul.
At least we had good sunsets.
