Road Trip: Around and About Tuscon: Day Five

As the sun arose from the underworld, we awoke from our slumber. We were finally in Tuscon and could begin to hit our major destinations of the trip. Our first item of business was the Sonora desert museum. Just to the South of town, take the Speedway exit from I10 and follow the signs... Yup, that didn't work. The little bit of construction traffic entering Tuscon was just the tip of the iceberg. Every single exit into or around downtown Tuscon was closed, every one. We ended up blasting through the entire town and getting off the highway the first chance we had. We rode upon the frontage road thus enabling us to make our turn.

After a quick trip through a mountain pass where I slid my transmission into first on the descent, we reached the museum. Flowers, cacti, and wildlife were everywhere. This was one of the most amazing zoos I've ever seen (though you might have a hard argument about calling this a zoo; there wasn't a bar or fence to be seen, excluding the two foot high wire to keep small children on the path). We did the grand tour of the park, walking the many loops and paths that circled upon themselves. We stopped to watch an otter exhibit with two river otters playing on a submerged log. We watched snakes burrowed into the ground. But the most amazing part of this park was the flora. Everything was in bloom, everything was lush, and everything was from the local desert.

Eventually our time at the museum had to end. We continued on the road through the desert to Saguaro National Park. We gained admittance from my multi agency pass (the $80 annual pass to all national parks and monuments). We did a quick tour of their automobile loop and decided to come back early tomorrow morning to do some hiking.

We headed out of the park and saw a sign for "Old Tuscon" and decided to check it out assuming it was some sort of historical village about people who lived in Tuscon a couple hundred years ago. It wasn't; it ended up being a $16/person western movie themed amusement park. This was much less exciting than we had hoped, and we decided to skip it.

As we skipped the awesomeness that might have been with "Old Tuscon," we stopped at the "International Wildlife Museum." Again, not quite what we thought. I was imagining a small zoo of something of that sort. Basically it was a museum filled with taxidermy animals. I'm guessing people inherit these huge collections of stuffed wildlife and say to themselves "hrm, there isn't much I can do with 50 stuffed animal heads that some distant relative shot." and they donate it to this foundation which teaches children about wildlife. It was actually pretty cool. Though the display about the history of taxidermy at the entrance got me into the mode of thinking of this as a museum about taxidermy (which rather weirded me out). It was quite interesting to stand next to the animals and see how huge some of them were though.

We made a quick trip back into Tuscon (avoiding the highway like a cow avoids the slaughterhouse) to pick up dinner at the Safeway earlier found. Tortellini was what we decided upon. We traveled out almost all the way to the national park and set up camp at the Gilbert Ray campsite. My tent was nestled between cacti and more cacti. The place was quiet, the restrooms quite clean, and head had running water only two sites away. The best part was the stars that night. A million pinpricks in the sheet of night glittering in the sky, all framed by saguaro cacti silhouettes. After sitting and reading for a bit, again it was time for sleep (this time with no rain fly so we could stare at the stars).