Soon to be Leaving Arizona...

When we stay in one place for a month or more, we try to hit the highlights of the area we are staying in. We've done several scenic drives in and around Tucson and Phoenix, we've visited Old Tucson Studios, Biosphere 2, seen the Goldfield mining town, attended spring training baseball games, and checked out some of the beautiful trails and canyons in central and south Arizona, and even made it to an arts festival....

lizard we saw on our marathon hike one day--5.9 miles!

What DIDN'T we see that we wish we had more time to go and do?  The Mariachi Conference in April in Tucson...Tombstone (although we heard it was a big tourist trap), the Old Tucson artisans on Telles Street Block in Tucson, the Mission San Xavier del Bac, located about 40 miles south of Tucson on the Tohono O'odham reservation, Slide Rock State Park, (with some incredible natural rock slides for swimming), the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West complex in Scottsdale, the Titan Missle Museum in Sahuarita, and so much more...of course in the northern part of the state is the Grand Canyon, and we are hoping to do that when we come back to Sedona, AZ in mid July.

I've seen several examples of this beautiful rock in the desert and in Palm Creek-malachite and azurite?

The idea of staying in one place for longer periods of time is designed to save on fuel, so we didn't want to keep taking lots of day trips to see stuff, when we have big fuel bills coming up on our way out to the northwest in a matter of a couple of weeks. We do have one more trip planned this week, and that is to see the Fort Apache Historic Park over in Whiteriver ....

Have you seen enough cactus photos? I never get tired of watching the blooms show more and more each day. Whatever the name of this particular desert plant in the above photo escapes me, but some of them out in the desert have even deeper flaming orange or deep cherry red blooms....the scenery will be changing on the blog soon!  See you later!

cactus blooms in Palm Creek