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unday in Tucson was filled with more fun adventures. Blue skies and a high of 82 were the perfect way to cap off the long weekend (the other two days had been in the 70's which was awesome as well). We were feeling significantly less adventurous in our hiking trail choice for Sunday morning based on the fact that we were fairly sore from the day before.
We settled on Brown Mountain, which was really more of a ridge, and only 10 minutes from Hobie's casita. We got a bit lost (we'll call it confused) and started at a different part of the trail than we meant to, meaning we probably did 5 or more miles, but with less than 500 feet of elevation gain it was still a breeze. We wound our way through a maze of different cacti and other desert flora and fauna, and I had some fun with the different saguaros:
I'm the saguaro. Can you tell?
Then we hit the ridge and enjoyed some nice views of the Saguaro National Park area.
After our hike we cleaned house a bit and enjoyed one last meal at the casita - nachos on the porch. I wish I'd snapped a few more pictures of the inside because Hobie did some really ingenious things with it, but you can see from the pictures that the outside is fantastic.
We drove off thinking we were headed to Mt Lemmon, the tallest mountain in the area which you can drive to the top of. It turned out to be a bit further away than we'd thought and our rental car was, um, not performing very well, so we nixed that idea. Next on my list was the Pima Air and Space Museum. It's adjacent to Davis Monthan Air Force Base and features one of the largest aircraft boneyards in the world. In fact, check out this sweet Google Image. And if you don't know what an aircraft boneyard is: Google it, cuz there's some pictures out there that are much cooler than mine.
Anyways, we popped in the museum and then poked around the exterior of the whole Base, marveling at things and snapping pictures. There are over 4,000 aircraft parked there awaiting their next life. Apparently Sunday is a working day for the base, because we started noticing some cool aircraft flying around overhead. I was super stoked and snapping pictures - they were flying so low I think they noticed my excitement because we literally got a couple passes that could not have been anything other than meant for us. Neat!
This whole experience may seem boring or odd to some of you, but I'm a bit of an aviation junkie and was so excited to get to stop by one of these boneyards and then get an air show at the same time. Matt had a good time too, don't worry.
After that we drove down to San Xavier Mission which is "In the vast desert on an Indian reservation just nine miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona, one would not expect to find a beautiful church. The San Xavier del Bac Mission was built between 1783 and 1797 by the Tohono O'odham tribe, under the direction of Spanish Franciscans." It wasn't really super high on our list but we had some free time. It was quite pretty, and interesting to walk around. Nothing to write home about, but worth the stop. I got a little snap-happy at the airplanes and didn't have a spare camera battery with me, so the pictures here are from my little point and shoot. Someday I'll learn.
After that we made the obligatory stop at In-n-Out for dinner (yummm) and were off to the airport to catch our 7:30 flight. The flight home renewed my hatred for regional jets and crappy off-site parking companies, but hey - we made it home before 3am. The trip was totally worth our exhaustion the next day! Thank you Hobie for sharing your lovely abode with us!
In the United lounge in LAX awaiting our next chariot
