7/5/13 - Tucson, AZ

We got up really early this morning and went to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.  It is a world-renowned zoo, natural history museum and botanical garden.  It opened at 7:30 and we took the bird walk with a guide.  He walked around with us for an hour and a half and then we walked around on our own.  We stayed for 5 hours.  They have an aviary, hummingbird enclosure, reptile house, aquarium, wolves, tortoises, coatis, javelinas, mountain lions, bobcats, brown bears, and then the desert.  There were lots of beautiful cacti.  The art house had an exhibit by Wil Lala who creates art from aluminum cans.  This is a fantastic museum with most of it outdoors.  They had a cave with exhibits of minerals.  Jim had just come out of the exhibit and I heard them on the walkie talkies shutting down the cave.  There was a rattlesnake inside that Jim had just walked by.  I went inside and watched them wrangle it with a grabber stick and put it in a box to be taken away.  This is the second Western Diamondback Rattlesnake that we have been very near in two days.  We need to get out of this place!

After leaving the museum we drove into the west side of the Saguaro National Park.  In April 2007 we came through Tucson and drove through the east side.  It was really nice early this morning and then the sun came out and it reached 100 degrees around noon.  As we were driving through the National Park, it clouded up and we saw lots of lightning and the temperature dropped to 80 degrees.  This is the coolest it has been in a few days.  We drove back to the Casita to put up the chairs and the outdoor thermometer.  We paid for another day at the RV park and had some lunch.  Jim wanted to visit a few more breweries so we drove to Borderlands Brewing, Thunder Canyon Brewing and Barrio Brewing.  We are going to leave Tucson tomorrow so we went to Fry’s (owned by Kroger) and used our gas points.  Gas was $3.18 and we got 50 cents per gallon off of that.  I bought a few groceries and then we went back to the Casita and had leftover pizza and more watermelon for dinner.