Things we encounter as I look around for some good ice cream

I may be a lawyer but my real love is making ice cream and it’s ruining my life. Pre-pandemic, I could eat ice cream anywhere – gas station fudgsicle, big tubs of Dreyer’s billed as homemade. But now I’ve been home for a year with my Cuisinart ice cream machine, taking in limited business but mixing batch after batch of ice cream. I want to talk to people about their cream/milk ratio and whether they use a custard base. I want to share my respect for xanthan gum as a stabilizer. I have a repertoire of exactly two flavors – butter pecan and stracciatella – but that doesn’t stop me from showing my disdain for a lesser ice cream product.

I thought, surely, as we travel around Sedona, surrounded by cute ice cream shops claiming “homemade” ice cream, I could find someone who wants to talk about ice cream. But, much like my other hobbies of license plate sequencing and photo ticket enforcement fines, there are no takers. I cannot figure you people out.

En route to Phoenix, though, I mapped us through the small town of Cave Creek. I had read about a small museum there and thought it was worth a stop, especially since it was next door to a place called Frontier Town, brimming with evidence of frontier life in the form of small stores selling candles and hand cream in the shadow of this guy.

I warned Ron to have low expectations at this Cave Creek stop, but neither one of us was prepared for the greetings offered by the staff at the Cave Creek Museum. Upon questioning as to why we were visiting, we told them that we stopped just to see their museum. To which the cashier replied REALLY? (She might require further training). And then she hauled over the rest of the staff to meet us, including the “curator”, a recent college grad from Cooperstown NY who somehow found her way from the east coast to Cave Creek to spearhead the exhibits for a museum with a March budget that likely consists of our $12 entrance fee.

We got a LOT of attention at the museum and I could feel Ron’s eyeballs boring a hole into the back of my head. I knew it was important that I seem interested as we had also met the Executive Director who asked us for feedback upon finishing but come on – I can do a museum in minutes and this was your typical history museum with a lot of archaeological information that I strolled right by. I did spy an old toaster exhibit, which I found thrilling, but failed to photograph, apparently, and a barbed wire exhibit that I pondered for a bit.

In addition, I learned that the early settlers of Cave Creek called their first newspaper The Vacuum Cleaner, which made me laugh and I was happy the Docent (different person than the Executive Director, the Curator and the Cashier…query how their salaries are paid) was not following us around:

I also learned that it is constitutional and legal in Arizona, when an election is close, to decide the contest with playing cards, which made me think hard about some recent events and I am glad that the only people seemingly aware of this Arizona election avenue are the crack Cave Creek staff and not CNN, FOX etc.

Ron wanted to sneak out the back of the museum so as to avoid the waiting crowds seeking feedback but I braved a walk back by the cashier and complimented their cool toaster collection and we were off! Ron, ever the striver (polite euphemism), offered praise about the archaeology room which, to me, was a lot of old bowls with cracks in them and timelines peppered with the word Clovis, which must be important but the toaster collection beckoned. There was also an old cabbage shredder which I proudly identified to the lead Docent as perhaps a shoe cleaner.

Ron agreed to pull over for a snack before heading to Phoenix and there, by the side of the road near Frontier Land, was an actual ice cream store where the employee could describe to me how the ice cream was made and welcomed me over to their ice cream machines, which are even more basic than mine:

Here is that wonderful ice cream store, should you be moved enough by my description of the Cave Creek Museum to stop by, and, lastly, another fine picture by Photographer Ron. It is hard to have good self esteem when he is my main photographer.