After leaving Alamogordo, NM we headed to AZ and the Tucson area. We stayed in a campground in St. David for about a week. It is another campground part of our membership. About an hour from Tucson but for $10/night I don’t mind driving a little.
Our first destination was the town of Tombstone, AZ. Tombstone is an old wild west mining town that makes you feel like you are back in the days of lawlessness and old movies. You have probably heard of the “O.K. Corral”, “The Bird Cage Theatre”, “Wyatt Earp”, “Doc Holliday” just to name a few. You can read the entire history at this site. For the most part it is just a tourist trap. We only spent about 2 hours here and since we don’t spend money on tourist stuff much there really wasn’t a lot to do. I wouldn’t make a special trip here but if you are in the area it is a neat place to walk around for a few hours.
We only took one day and went into Tucson. In Tucson we walked the historic walking trail to see some of the sites. Tucson is such a beautiful area with all the brightly colored homes. I think Polly and I have decided we would like to have one of these one day. For lunch we ate at the El Charro Café which claims to be the birth place of the Chimichanga which is my favorite Mexican dish. The Legendary Monica Flin, who opened her El Charro Café in 1922, is well‐known as the originator of the Chimichanga. While frying her now famous El Charro ground beef tacos, she accidentally dropped a burro into the frying pan and when the oil splashed up she was about to lash out a common Spanish cuss word starting with “Ch”, but because she was amongst her young nieces and nephews, changed it to “Chimichanga”, the equivalent of “thingamajig”. It was good but not quite as good as our old favorite Mexican place back home.
Our last stop was Saguaro National Park. When you think of Arizona you think of the cactus. The saguaro catus is the well know tall cactus with “arms” that you see in all the AZ brochures. Since 1933 the saguaro cactus has been protected by the park. The park is in the Sonoran Desert with temperatures commonly climbing above 100 degrees and gets less than 12” of rain a year. Many of the saguaros can suck up as much as 200 gallons of water which is enough to last then an entire year. Many of the saguaros we saw were over 150 years old. Of course being from the east coast we had never seen real tall cacti like this so it was a treat. While in the park we did about a 3.5 mile hike through the cacti (was suppose to be less but we missed a turn). The kids also got their Junior Ranger badges.
Once again another great time. The weather was mostly nice and certainly much better than NC. We would certainly like to come back here again in the winter.
Next stop will be north of Tucson near the town of Casa Grande, AZ and the Case Grande Ruins.
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My favorite picture is the one with you and Polly behind bars……you look so mad!
I guess our really sad faces made us look like really sad criminals. I was afraid that the boys were going to really lock us in the jail.