Success!

This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it is apparently the best I'm going to be able to do. It's not on linen like the souvenir tea towels of the past. It's printed on cotton that's more like old-fashioned flour sack material. But it comes close enough -- a souvenir towel at a reasonable price.

Even better, it's Made in USA. The towels are produced by a company based in Colorado. I found it at a trading post, the Pickle Barrel, in Globe, Arizona. When it comes to Arizona souvenirs the Pickle Barrel has them all, from the suckers with scorpions embeddded in them to rusty metal javelinas. I really wanted a javelina but decided that $75 was more than I felt like paying for yard art. (I did, however, do some heavy hinting to The Kid. She says they're too big and heavy to ship. I say no way, UPS can ship almost anything, especially when a life-size metal javelina isn't actually that big and the sheet metal is fairly thin.)

Anyway, in addition to the coasters and the shot glasses and the various other dust collectors, the Pickle Barrel had a selection of souvenir kitchen towels. There were several that could serve as souvenirs of national parks (e.g., Saguaro), one that just had cactus, and then there was the road runner. I figured road runners are definitely Arizona.

The towels are now on their way to Europe, along with some cactus tea and one or two other regional souvenirs. Naturally, the postage for each package came to more than the combined value of the items in them. I swear every time I go to the Post Office the price of mailing stuff out of the country has gone up -- but that's a subject for a different post.