3 DAYS IN TUCSON, ARIZONA

MY WEEK IN PHOTOS: MARCH 18–24, 2019!

A long weekend in Tucson, Arizona visiting Saguaro National Park, the Sonoran Desert Museum, the mine in Bisbee, Tombstone, searching for javelinas, and eating a lot of Mexican food.

Enjoy!

Tiny breads and avocado to start the week

A little more effort than usual for an event at work tonight.

Sun is setting

The Frank Gehry models are out from the Getty archives.

And the event begins, goes, and ends.

Got to head out early from work on Tuesday for some comp time. Finished up some freelance stuff in my work room.

My poor butchered tomato plant. But I made some mistakes keeping the cover on the plants, it rained a lot and I think the soil was getting moldy. Some of the leaves were unhappy so I pulled them off. And then I took off all the unhappy branches and before I knew it…it was a lil’ stick.

Baking some asparagus for dinner

And finished up the rest of the larb recipe that Zach started in the slow cooker.

We had some rain and then another shy little rainbow.

Really delicious Thai Coconut Soup

Some cold brew and a check in on my window sill plants.

Need to get that lint roller going

Last evening cuddling with my Twoooo

Friday morning, early morning flight with James and Zach to Tucson.

We’ve arrived in Arizona!

Center for Creative Photography!

Richard Avedon shows from their archives

Walking through the University of Arizona campus, love the citrus grove. It smelled so good.

Turtle pond! I think it’s mating season 🙂

The was a street fair down 4th and I was soaking in all the handmade ceramics inspiration.

Refresher

Boca Tacos y Tequila

Definitely should have not filled up on chips and salsa and guac

Props to the garage door business promo shirt

*Not pictured* Me getting a little too excited at a garlic olive oil booth that I ate a bunch of samples with bread without thinking I shouldn’t be having gluten. Oops.

Brief journey to Wholefoods to get some supplies for the weekend. (Cave shake is the worst branding I’ve seen in a while)

I was told this style of house is called a ‘casita’ (which my three year Spanish lessons tells me that it’s basically ‘little house’). There are so many cute houses in Arizona with this square shape, sometimes they have colorful accents…I wish I got more photos.

Made it to our accommodations.

Surprised to find a cat living with us for the weekend! Riff Raff!

We all rested a bit and then the sun was starting to go down so we packed up ready to catch a nice view.

Get off that mini-trampoline and get in the caaar

Suddenly the landscape revealed saguaros as far as the eye can see.

We park the car and make our way up to the viewpoint at Gates Pass

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS *GASP*

We had a great view, but decided to hike up a bit to get a higher vantage point.

Got on a rock at the very tippy top and could see all directions.

And now, time to wait for sunset

Could we be related

I had my 50mm on so it was…more a portrait of us and less of the views but that’s ok, cute nonetheless.

Time to head back to get changed for dinner.

By changed I mean…adding a beanie.

Only managed one photo of this very delicious margarita at Cafe Poca Cosa. I had two types of mole! All delicious.

Tried this cider at a brewery nearby. Not bad.

Good morning! It’s Saturday.

Visiting the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures, a museum of antique and contemporary miniatures, toys, collectables, houses, etc.

“The Mini Time Machine was created from the imagination and dedication of Founders, Patricia and Walter Arnell. Pat’s fondness for miniatures began in the 1930’s, when as a young girl she received her first miniatures- a set of Strombecker wooden dollhouse furniture.”

I wish was patient and talented enough to get into miniatures.

I didn’t realize the Kewpie Mayo baby is an actual collectible doll.

I feel like I’ve entered a world that is bigger than I could ever have imagined.

Tiny noooooodles

A miniature of the Gamble House, a house in Pasadena!

Realizing we could probably spend another hour there, we rushed a bit through the rest of the displays.

And then we drove from the city into the desert.

Stopped at Tucson Mineral and Gem World, a roadside rock shop and cabinet of curiosities open since 1968.

Gems and minerals (to be expected) of all kinds were for sale

And so are artifacts of questionable authenticity

It does say these artifacts were acquired pre-1967, but when?? By whom! Tell me more.

Picked out a geode and a budget gem, purchased, and headed back out.

Quick stop on the side of the road, just getting pumped by the winding drive through the desert. Need to get out and see some cacti up close.

We’ve made it to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (big thank you to Dusty for recommending this place, what a cool place to work!)

Porcupine, bobcat, fox…ahhh, everybody so cute and amazing to run and jump around. (Well the porcupine wasn’t jumping, but shuffling rather)

Cactus Gardens

The Desert Museum is a combination zoo, garden, art gallery, natural history museum and aquarium. You can wander outdoors through the gardens, animal enclosures, and in and out of displays about mining, geology, the history of the environment, etc.

River otter omg so cute

Underwater view

BEAVER

I learned that a saguaro grows its first arm around 70 years old. So do you think this one grew its first arm at 70 and its second ata 140? I know nothing, but I do love saguaros.

Wulfenite in the underground mineral and geology exhibition. I learned wulfenite is Arizona’s state mineral. Apparently California’s state mineral is gold, not sure why I didn’t know that?

Moving on to the Mountain Woodland display, of wildlife from the southwestern mountain ranges. A mountain lion resting on the rocks.

White-tailed deer

Gray wolf!!!

This owl destroyed me. So cute.

Hello, I’m sweaty. Brief intermission to have some water while the crew eats some ice cream.

Great blue heron collecting twigs and moving them carefully from one side of his pond to another.

We had tickets for the wine tasting evening, so we decided to head out for the afternoon since we’d be back later.

Javelinaaaaa

We drove a little deeper into the desert to see some of the petroglyphs, made between A.D. 200 and 1450 by the Hohokam.

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Brief walk up to the top of Signal Hill

“What do the petroglyphs mean? We usually do not try and interpret the images or assign specific meanings. Some meanings were not meant to be known or understood except by the people who made it. Some meanings were not meant to be known by the uninitiated…”

A saguaro with six arms

Based on seeing a 15 year old cactus at the desert museum, I estimate this one is around my age.

We went to a gastropub for dinner and then drove back into the Saguaro National Park for the wine night at the Desert Museum.

When we arrived to the wine tasting event, we quickly realized we’d need to hurry along to visit different stations and my most important thing to visit was the stingray touch zone. We put our hands in the water, and the stingrays came up to your hand for a pet. SoOoooOo cute.

Some sleepy animals and the beautiful night sky.

I wish I caught the name of this cactus flower. Night bloom!

Another terrible long exposure photograph but I tried to capture the beautiful sky in the desert, and…well…I tried.

Good morning, it’s Sunday! We drove out to Bisbee, a town originally founded as a mining town in 1880. The population of the town declined until the 1960s when artists moved into town bringing with them interest in renovating mining town era buildings. But now there are also restaurants, coffee shops, a theater, and of course museums dedicated to mining-era Bisbee.

From wikipedia, why not. A little bit of context for what went down for how this mining town avoided ghost town life and became a happening place: “Artist Stephen Hutchison and his wife Marcia purchased the Copper Queen Hotel, the town’s anchor business and architectural gem, from the Phelps-Dodge mining company in 1970. The company had tried to find a local buyer, offering the deed to any local resident for the sum of $1, but there were no takers. The property needed renovation for continued use.

Hutchison purchased and renovated the hotel, as well as other buildings in the downtown area. One held the early 20th-century Brewery and Stock Exchange. Hutchison began to market Bisbee as a destination of the “authentic,” old Southwest. His work attracted the developer Ed Smart.

Among the many guests at the hotel have been celebrities from nearby California. Actor John Wayne was a frequent visitor to Bisbee and the Copper Queen. He befriended Hutchison and eventually partnered with Smart in his real estate ventures. This period of Bisbee’s history is well documented in contemporary articles in The New Yorker and in an article by Cynthia Buchanan in The Cornell Review. It was at this time that Bisbee became a haven for artists and hippies fleeing the larger cities of Arizona and California. Later it attracted people priced out by gentrification of places such as Aspen, Colorado.”

Popped in for a coffee

We had limited time so we had to choose between the mine tour and the mining museum.

After seeing this mine tour exiting the mine on the train…we had to join.

Bought our tickets, got on our gear, and headed out with our guide to enter the mine on the mine train. This is the Queen Mine btw.

This copper mine was the most productive copper mine in Arizona in the early 1900s. Copper was mined here in various methods through the 80s.

The guide was a miner who actually worked here years ago. He thoroughly explained the different types of jobs, the evolution of mining equipment, and shared stories of what it was like to work underground.

Explaining how you would light up the dynamite to time correctly so the inner holes would explode first and then out outwards in a circle so the whole thing didn’t cave.

🙂 You know

Back into the world.

A lot of intense staircases up to houses appearing to teeter on the cliffs.

Was hard to pick something gluten-free and dairy-free…and accidentally picked something with so much cheese BUT the soup was really delicious.

Popped into the historical society building in an old fancy department store. They have all kinds of Bisbee objects on display from the residents of Bisbee.

Dog not an artifact

Learned about the 1917 Bisbee miners deportation to New Mexico, where when the miners organized to ask for better working conditions and wages, the Phelps Dodge Corporation hired private police to move 1,000 miners at gun point. Bummer.

Time to wrap it up and head back out on the road.

We’re here in Tombstone, Arizona. Now a touristy town, but was once an important frontier boomtown. The local mines produced the most silver in Arizona in the mid-1880s.

We made our way to the OK Corral, a stable at the end of the main road. It’s famous for the gunfight between the Earp brothers and some cowboys? If you’re into westerns, you may have heard of this…I, an ignorant person, know little of the ‘new frontier-era’ “wild wild west.”

Here’s where it went down, in the back behind the actual corral.

In the back, there was a small ‘crib’ for sex workers’ use, a photo studio, and a boarding house.

We watched a very campy “reenactment” of what went down at the OK Corral gunfight. Still unclear to me at this point what the real story was. A kid was shouting about bad guys and good guys and it stressed me out thinking about distilling the history of a questionable era in the US into “good” and “bad” guys when all these ‘pioneers’ were ‘exploring’ and claiming land in the so-called American frontier. I need to learn more about this time period when settlers moved westward across what is now the US and took land, and killed indigenous people in their path west. Just…on the brain.

At the same time, imagining life living in a boomtown was interesting.

Fire truck wagon

Big Nose Kate saloon, complete with a live pianist. Original building built in 1881, and was a hotel building before it turned into a tourist saloon.

Bird Cage Theater, one of the only original buildings with original floors and walls and bullet holes and everything.

A drawing of what the Bird Cage Theater used to look like with the catwalk built over the top. Along the sides of the theater were the cages (you could see the staircase up to that level in the entry) for private encounters with the ladies, and a better view of the stage.

Tombstone at dusk

Goodnight Tombstone

Passed through the cemetery

Heading back to Tucson into the sunset

A last meal of Mexican food deliciousssss.

I had a great time in Tucson, had too many photos to go through!

Much love friends.