Day 1: The Desert Museum

This post marks the kickoff of Trip Recap Week, which immediately follows Cactus Week at Miles and Laurel.  This post may be particularly lengthy, as its author, fresh off a redeye flight from Phoenix, is watching rain and 40 degrees outside her window and would much rather blog than go out for the run she had intended to do!

I think I will recap in mostly chronological order, okay?

Last Wednesday, I stepped off the plane and onto the rental car shuttle and immediately started seeing cactus after cactus after cactus.  As I noted last week: so many cacti.  It reminded me of how foreign the desert landscape was to me - in fact, this was my first time in Arizona.  I was very excited to explore.

I got my car and drove straight to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.  The drive from Phoenix to Tucson is a 110-mile straight shot southward, but adding the museum (on the west side of Tucson) into the itinerary meant a much more interesting route.  I got to drive through the Saguaro National Forest!

I have never, ever, ever seen so many cacti in my life, let alone the giant saguaros.  I pulled a Gigantic Tourist Move and stopped my car to take a photo.

Then I got to the museum.  There was a huge line of people waiting to get in, possibly because the day's forecast was supposed to be the coolest (77 degrees and sunny) of the week. (The museum had stocked bathrooms with sunscreen dispensers next to the soap!  Thank you, thank you!)

All week, the sky was so, so blue.  Obviously, I loved it.

I'll get right to the point and note that the Desert Museum may be my favorite museum ever.  It's appropriate for all ages. There are kids' exhibits and animals mixed in with historical and cultural information and lots of cacti.  It's a mix of indoor and outdoor exhibits, but the best part to me was the Desert Loop Trail.  It's about a mile and a half long and just beautiful.

The trail just curves around and around and looks like this:

The Desert Museum is also wonderful for solo travelers.  I was on my way to meet Josh, who was with his baseball team for the week, so I had a mix of activities planned both with him and on my own.  I used to travel a lot for work on my own, and that really sharpened my sense of solo tourism.  I can't very well go out and trot around a random patch of desert on my own, so this was a perfect introduction to it.

I also chatted with some of the museum's docents. At the start of the loop, one docent was introducing guests to the wonderful saguaro cactus, which you've heard me ramble extensively about already.  First, he instructed the visitors on how to pronounce it: sah-WAHR-oh.  (The "g" takes an "h" sound.)  Then I learned how very old these guys are.  A saguaro starts as a tiny little seed, as small as a poppy seed, and grows and grows.  It has to be around 50-70 years old before it even starts growing little arms.  Later in the week, I learned that they can live up to 250 years or so.  The best way to calculate their age, the docent told me, is by using historical photos to see when a given saguaro popped up in a landscape.

Thus, these little guys in the foreground of this photo are relatively quite young - although they may be older than me!

Doesn't that all blow your mind!?

There is also a stop for a cave.  It might be meant for kids.  I went in and greatly enjoyed it.

That's "unless you are a troglobite, STOP!  Darkness ahead!"

And along the way, there are fun trivia boards, like this one:

The answer is "nearly everything."

I spent at least two hours at the museum before going to my first baseball game of the week, but I could have stayed for hours longer. I almost even went back the next day.

The Desert Museum definitely started my week off on the right foot.  If you find yourself in Tucson, you must go!