Hey Dude! (Ranch)

My inner nine year old lives out her dude ranch dreams at Tanque Verde

During our Spring Break this year, we spent four days at Tanque Verde Dude Ranch near Tucson, Arizona. I have been trying to talk Tommy into a dude ranch vacation for years, almost entirely based on my childhood love for the short-lived tv show “Hey, Dude!” Not sure why he’s been opposed - I think he thought it sounded cheesy. Which it absolutely is a bit. However, it’s a really easy vacation to go on, essentially an all inclusive (although they have an a la carte booking option too) with a fantastic kids club program, good food, comfortable rooms that include an adult bedroom with a door and sleeping space for three kids (a highly sought after situation for a family of five), and lots of outdoor activities. It’s basically his dream trip.

My persistence paid off and he finally agreed. I booked Tanque Verde because Arizona has great weather in March. I didn’t realize until months later that it was the filming site for the tv show. It was a beautiful moment when I realized it on a Tuesday morning, that not only would we be going to a dude ranch, but we were going to the dude ranch that motivated me to want to go in the first place. Best Tuesday of this year, right up until the Tuesday we were AT the ranch.

Tuesday happened to be the day that we saw the Hey, Dude! set. I had read it was still there but not accessible to guests without help from the staff. We stopped by the front desk to buy our obligatory Christmas ornament souvenir and to ask how we can see the set. Several years ago, I found a Hey, Dude! DVD set at a garage sale, and so the kids have watched it a million times driving in the van - we only have so many DVD choices. I wasn’t the only one invested in seeing the real thing. Earlier in the week, Tommy and I had done axe throwing with this guy who was such a character - his voice would randomly change to a deep, scratchy voice halfway through a sentence. He did orientation to axe throwing by telling us that he watched one YouTube video and that’s all he knows, then demonstrating and missing the target. It was a trip.

Well, guess who happened to be walking through the office when we were asking about seeing the set but our friend Stephan from axe throwing. He immediately offered to take us out there to see it, right now. So we all hopped in a golf cart and headed out down some dirt roads. We got to a gate with a code, and he didn’t have the code. Thankfully, after he typed the same code in over and over with the same result, a truck pulled up with a couple of kids camp counselors. They put the code in and let us through.

Stephan tried to search up the Hey, Dude! theme song for us, but didn’t find it. Tommy found it so we bopped along in our golf cart down this dirt road in the desert for the length of the theme song until we got to two ramshackle buildings, if you can call them that. Hollywood didn’t build them to last, and the ranch had not maintained them. The only thing that had been maintained was a small horse corral, where the counselors from the kids program were keeping their personal horses (which they had come to take care of). We looked around, took a few pictures, and saw it. Stephan said that one of the employees was a musical theatre major and campaigning for the ranch to restore the buildings and create a nightly performance about Hey, Dude! So maybe, someday, it will be something to see again.

They allow you to start booking activities, of which there are MANY, one week ahead of each day. So for the week prior, I’d wake up, book the kids club (included in the all inclusive). You can cancel anything but the kids club is the only place the kids can ride horses, and there is a daytime program from 8 AM - 4 PM and then a night program from 5 PM - 9 PM. So we just booked all of it, figuring we could cancel whatever we didn’t want to use.

So anyway, we arrived and got checked in. I want to note here that the staff at the ranch was quirky and mostly fantastic, and the reception experience was no different. She told us our room was ready when we arrived at noon, and gave us a printed schedule, helped us sign up for a few more activities for Tommy and I, gave us a property map, and helped us make reservations for our meals that day. They require you to make reservations for all meals, even though they are included, just to manage capacity at the restaurant. They are not very rigid about the actual timing, so a couple times during the trip we forgot what time our reservation was or just showed up early, and they always accommodated us.

We headed to lunch in the large, very on theme restaurant. Because Spring Break is high season for them, they were running a kids buffet and an adult buffet for lunch. There was also a menu we could order from if we didn’t want the buffet, or we could make a salad from the buffet and then eat an item from the menu. Very flexible, easy for everyone to find what they wanted. Overall, the food is good, kind of what you’d expect. Steak, shrimp pasta, etc. The kids loved having a buffet for every meal as an option, and if they are in the kids club during a meal, they just eat at the buffet. Theoretically, they could eat all their meals with the kids club, although our kids preferred to eat with us instead of in the kids dining room with a movie on.

I won’t run through the whole day-by-day of our trip, but a few highlights.

Harper and Theo loved riding horses in the kids program. They also liked doing tie-dye, although I refused to bring home dyed wet bandanas on our road trip, fearing ending up with crazy stains on something. They painted horseshoes, worked with clay, played a zillion games.

Tommy and I took a beginner horsemanship lesson, which was fun because neither of us really knew how to ride a horse actually. Tommy liked it so much he took an intermediate lesson a day later and discovered that loping is terrifying. We also did a trail ride which was an incredible way to experience the beauty of the area. We did a hike in Saguaro National Park, which is right next door to the ranch and you can walk between them. Tommy also did a mountain biking ride one morning.

For me, thinking about the all inclusive vacations we’ve done (Disney Cruise, resort in Mexico, and dude ranch), I liked the dude ranch the best. I liked having so many activities, especially so much to do outside. I get a little bored on the cruise and at the resort (I can imagine this would be even more boring now that I’m not drinking).

There were families that had been coming to Tanque Verde for forty years. You can get a brick with your family’s name installed in the walkway to the restaurant after seven years (not sure on the exact timing of this). There were few enough guests that we got to know a lot of the other people on the trip, sharing tips from activities we’d done, hearing about other trips, just hanging out at the one bar on property during happy hour or watching the horses turn out in the evening to eat hay. I get it, I get wanting to go back, to spend the time in the perfect weather, riding horses in a gorgeous setting. It’s a place that is truly a vacation for the whole family, which is hard on a family vacation. Sometimes trips feel like work as the parent, and when you get home, you need a different vacation without the kids to recover. But not this trip. It creates a great balance with the chill flow between kids programming, activities for adults, and time for family together too.