HUMOR

Special attractions - including Cave Creek Museum and Gateway Desert Awareness Park, a 26-acre natural preserve and picnic area along Galloway Wash - give a sense of the town's own history and special, delicate environment. We saw several bed and breakfasts in Cave Creek - the Painted Pinto, Full Circle Ranch, Coyote Hill and Redbuck Ranch among them, but we chose Andora Crossing Bed & Breakfast to check out, mostly because we liked its ad in Arizona's Unplugged Bed and Breakfast.

Owner Karen Douglass, an artist who paints with acrylics, gave us a tour of her inviting rooms each with big comfy beds, countrytype wash basins and hand-tiled bathrooms. Families of quail and cottontail rabbits live outside. At night, you'll hear coyotes and snorting, rooting javelinas.

Located on Military Road, this B&B was designed by Douglass in the fashion of Arizona's 1940s and '50s dude ranches, the special haunts of glamorous Hollywood stars and wealthy American travelers.

Douglass, whose personal library bulges with history and art books, told us that Military Road was so named in the late 1860s because it was the road used by the U.S. Cavalry when soldiers traveled between Fort McDowell in central Arizona and Fort Whipple near Prescott.

On a typical day, Douglass said, she serves huge homemade breakfasts featuring Nuevo Vaquero ("new cowboy") cuisine. That morning, she served her guests - all members of the same wedding party - homemade granola, Zane Grey eggs (cheddar cheese eggs, spiced with sage), turkey sausages, fresh salsa and homemade blueberry muffins.

Andora Crossing is closed in the summer. Room rates range from $100 a night to $150 a night for the Owl's Nest, a separate guesthouse with two bedrooms.

After Douglass' talk about breakfast, we were hungry, so we headed east again for Sunday brunch at the Carefree Inn and Conference Resort. The $25 a person price might seem steep, but the fare's really wonderful and there's a lot of it. Fresh shrimp, poached and chilled salmon, lox with red onion and capers, chicken in lemon sauce, tender prime rib with horseradish sauce and au jus, omelets made to order, mounds of fresh salads and crudités - all of this made the more tasty by iced, mouth-tingling champagne.

After brunch, we met with Jason Sawicki, a resort representative who told us about the inn and gave us a tour, which included the Presidential Suite spacious, luxurious quarters that you can have for $390 a night during peak season (winter and early spring), or $179 during the off-season. If you think that's a lot, try The Boulders resort. It actually sits in Scottsdale, just outside of Carefree, yet it's definitely one of the two towns' main attractions. During peak season, a guest casita at The Boulders, with its golf course, five restaurants, tennis courts and body-soothing spa, goes for as much as $565 a night. It's dear, yet The Boulders isn't so much a place to spend the night as a place where you'd want to spend the rest of your life, pampered and hidden away from the world among red granite boulder hills.

In fact, that's the nature of Carefree - it's for pampering and getting away. A planned community that began to take shape in 1959, it was incorporated in 1984. Today, it covers 8.5 square miles, and has a population of 2,510. It's a special place that offers wonderful restaurants, pricey but marvelous spa treatments, great shopping and "cool" events such as el Pedregal Festival Marketplace's concerts under the stars (April through June).

Speaking of el Pedregal, when you go to Carefree, don't miss it. Just the way this open-air mall of shops and restaurants looks will make you happy. It's like a sand-colored Southwestern pueblo, featuring structural cutouts framed with splashes of hot neon color - pink, electric cyan, sea green, sun orange and bright turquoise. It's like a cartoon version of a pueblo - a place you'd come upon during a very happy dream.

The Heard Museum North opened at el Pedregal in 1996 as a branch of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, founded in 1929, which enjoys world renown for its extensive collections of Indian cultural art and fine art.

The Cave Creek Museum, on the corner of Basin and Skyline roads, opens 1 to 4 P.M., Wednesday through Sunday, October through May. This volunteer operation displays artifacts of local gold mining, prehistoric Indian dwellings and tools, ranch life, Indian pottery and guest ranch life.

A 1922 "tuberculosis cabin" on the grounds represents the state's days as a haven for victims of TB who would "take the cure" in these isolation cabins. The small, one-room building contains a single metal-frame bed and a sink. Its windows wear white, gauzy curtains that filter the sun. The rich and notorious, including Doc Holliday, favored Cave Creek for health.

A museum coloring book teaches children about Indian rock art symbols for friends, corn, happiness, life, rivers, clouds, antelopes and Gila monsters.

As the sun set, we headed south back to Phoenix. We hadn't traveled far from home, yet we'd been in two new worlds - Cave Creek and Carefree, where you can eat "cowboy vittles" and you're promised a glimpse of the mythical jackalope (you know, a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope) and a lush Sonoran hideaway for pampering guests. In these towns, visitors can get a facial, buy Indian art, take a jeep ride to the Hohokam ruins at Humboldt Mountain, play tennis and eat well - a wonderful true/tres West time. AH