Link to more photos. View the photos individually to see the captions.
We took a group tour to Tucson and vicinity. It went pretty well. The weather was good. We stayed at a resort hotel, but had no time to use the resort facilities. Also, oddly, the only evening dining options were the limited bar menu or room service. They apparently expect guests to eat dinner elsewhere, but our group schedule didn't include dinner stops, so were stuck with the hotel. And because the hotel is rather isolated, there were no nearby restaurants to walk to, either.
We began with a morning tour of the city. That included a stop at Mission San Xavier del Bac, but I didn't go in. In the afternoon, we went to the Titan Missile Museum, going underground to the launch control center, including a simulated launch, and viewing a Titan II missile in the launch duct.
Tombstone was not for me. The tourist street was like many others, and I'm not much into the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, especially not in triplicate: first a short movie about it, then the actual site, looking at eight mannequins of the participants and listening to a recording telling the story again, followed by a reenactment with live actors. Plus the next day, our tour director showed the 1957 movie about it (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) on the bus. Sigh.
I did like the adjacent C.S. Fly's Photo Gallery of mostly 1880s photos.
Next was the Copper Queen Mine tour, wearing hard hats, safety vests, and carrying miner's headlamps, riding an original mine train, straddling a bench seat, into the mine. At several stops, our retired miner guide told us about mining and miners' work, tools, and lives.
On our way to and from Tombstone and the mine, we passed the 'Boneyard' the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base — over 4000 out-of-service military aircraft in row after row, sitting alongside the highway.
Because of the federal government shutdown, we could not tour Saguaro National Park, but we took photos nearby. Our substitute stop was the Tucson Botanical Gardens. I liked the butterfly pavilion and the masses of marigolds in the Frida Kahlo garden.
Kartchner Caverns was OK, but they had some very annoying rules:
- no cameras or smartphones (!!) (Nope, I have no photos.)
- "no food or drink past this point" at the door of Visitor Center (?!) but despite that, when I asked, they said a water bottle is OK, as long as it has a cap, and they couldn't explain the contradiction
- leave all purses and bags in a locker, and the lockers aren't free (!!) and require four quarters (who has that?!!) and there's no change machine (!!) and you have to go inside to ask for quarters in exchange for bills (!!)
GRRR.
We spent one morning at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum — part zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, and natural history museum.
At Biosphere 2, I particularly liked the lung, a cylindrical tank containing a flexible membrane attached to a heavy metal plate, which rises and falls to equalize pressure. I was also looking forward to seeing the ocean, but there wasn't much to see.