It is nice to visit the fancy resort campgrounds, and chum around with all of the super friendly Escapee MembersÂ….but! There is one thing that Judy and I agree on, it is just so neat to get out in the wilds in a small state, county or federal campground. For the next two days we will be in the Pima County, Tucson Mountain Park in the Gilbert Ray Campground. We came here specifically to see the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. We expect to ride the bicycle over there tomorrow and spend most of the day. This is a high desert area at 2600 feet. The cacti are just everywhere. In a short walk this evening we saw Saguaro cactus, Cholla (pronounced choy-ya) cactus, both the teddy bear and pencil varieties, Prickly Pear cactus, Ocitilo, (pronounced oci-teeyo) and Barrel cactus. We also spotted a coyote trotting through the campground. By the time we got back to the coach the sun was set and the stars were popping out all over. We dug out the binoculars and had a good look at Venus just before it followed the sun below the horizon. We could actually see the crescent shape of it. The Pleiades cluster of stars was directly overhead and the Orion constellation was sparkling in the eastern skies: As we stood gazing at the Milky-Way a meteor streaked across our sky.
We got an early start this morning from Benson Arizona, one of our Escapee Co-Op parks. We planned a short drive, and we pulled into the Pima Air Museum in Tucson, just after it opened. We spent most of the day looking over the museum airplanes. We also took a bus ride tour to the Davis-Monahan Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. That is a big name that boils down to an acronym, AMARC, and is a parking lot for over 4,000 military airplanes of about every type you can think of. Red Bearon, my Beanie Babies aviator bear, got to get up close to several airplanes and get his picture taken. I think his favorite was the Super Guppy built in 1962 to carry Apollo space craft components. Check out the photo below. You will have to squint to see him, he is pretty small.
We send our New Year’s greeting so all of our friends and relatives.
Love from Gary and Judy.
By the way, you can hardly call this roughing it. We have cell phone, internet and electricity. It might get down to freezing tonight, however.
Gary
