Tucson Trip
Feb. 17th, 2023 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreSorry for the long delay in writing this. I was tied up with a few things, including a volunteer task for an upcoming event, working on a new story for an upcoming show, and a couple of decluttering rabbit holes. The latter may be a subject for a future post.
I went to Tucson the weekend before last. The reason for the trip was a FlyerTalk event, essentially a Sunday brunch. Since I had never been to Tucson before, I figured I could leverage off that as an excuse to spend a couple of days there.
I flew out on Thursday, which gave me an opportunity to use the newish silver line metro route to IAD. I had not thought to check the schedule, however, so arrived at East Falls Church to see a 40 minute wait. Since it was cold out, I continued on to Ballston to wait in more comfort. Fortunately, I had enough time to get to IAD for my flight.
Anyway, I flew via Houston, and managed to get upgraded on both flights, which was nice. I had less luck with the rental car. I had reserved a compact car with Budget, but, after a long wait, they stuck me with a full-size car. I stayed at the Towne Place Suites by the airport, which I chose only because hotel prices were very high, presumably due to the Gem and Mineral Show going on in town. The hotel was perfectly fine for what it was and was surprisingly quiet for an airport hotel.
On Friday, I got together with my friend, Joel. We’ve known each other on-line for decades, via a humor-oriented mailing list, but had never met in person before. He has a membership to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is generally considered one of the top attractions of the area, so we headed there. We got there in time to see the Raptor Free Flight, which involved a talk and demonstration with several Harris’s hawks, that flew right over our heads. Most of them were, in fact, too close to photograph, but I did get this picture of one overhead.
We walked around much of the site, which is fairly large. Some of the things we saw were otters (hard to get decent pictures of) and hummingbirds. We failed to see a javelina. We did, however, see a big-horned sheep.
Right after I told Joel I doubted we would see a coyote, this guy decided to prove me wrong.
This being the Sonoran desert, there were, of course, lots of cacti.
There was also a boojum tree, which Joel described as “an upside-down carrot.” Of course, I had to make a snarky comment about it. (I hope at least a few of you know your Lewis Carroll well enough to understand this.)
Other things we did (in no particular order) included having coffee and lunch, looking at reptiles, walking through the aviary, and stopping at their art gallery, where I particularly liked these paintings by Diane Bennett done on old metal signs.
After several hours at the Museum, we returned to the car. Joel took a leisurely drive through the western part of Saguaro National Park (with a stop at the visitor center for me to stamp my National Park passport) before he dropped me off back at my hotel.
I am one of those people who always browses the racks of brochures at tourist info centers and next to hotel elevators and flips through the magazines that tell you of things to do. That led to me being reminded of the existence of Biosphere 2. Not many of you know this, but I had a traineeship in graduate school that was funded by NASA’s Closed Environmental Life Support Systems (CELSS) project. So this was something I felt more or less obliged to see. It’s now owned by the University of Arizona and is focused on more general environmental research, not oriented towards created closed systems for use in space. The history of it is interesting and somewhat bizarre and controversial, though the more salacious parts of the story were definitely downplayed at the site. I highly recommend reading the wikipedia page if you’re interested in how it went wrong.
Anyway, it was about an hour drive north of my hotel. You download an app that has various clips you can watch during the 23 stop self-guided tour, which takes you around several parts of the site. Here is an overview of the site.
You go through the human habitat, which includes a kitchen, library, labs, and apartments. The latter actually looked more comfortable than I expected.
This is the exterior of the domes with the controlled environments, which include coastal fog desert, thorn scrub, mangroves, lower savana, ocean, savana, and rainforest.
I wish I’d been able to get a decent picture of the ocean. It used to have a coral reef, but that has completely died and not been replaced yet. I did get a reasonable picture of the rainforest.
Another brochure I’d seen was for the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures. I like dollhouses to begin with and the brochure featured a particularly intriguing one, so I couldn’t resist.
That’s right - the Addams Family Mini Mansion, made by Ara Bentley. It has wonderful detail and was alone enough to justify the price of admission to the museum. I mean, just look at Cousin Itt in the leftmost room on the second floor. It’s a brilliant piece of art.
There is, of course, a lot more normal stuff to see. Here, for example, is a Gone With the Wind diorama.
Another impressive piece was this sculpture carved out of a pencil point.
And, getting more topical, Remarkable Presence by Jen Urso commemorates people who died of COVID-19.
All in all, the museum had quite a lot to see and I recommend it to anyone who appreciates miniatures.
Moving on to Sunday, I lazed around in the morning for a while, reading and doing puzzles, before heading off to Micha’s to meet the Flyertalk crowd for brunch. The food was pretty good and the conversation was lively and amusing.
After brunch, I drove to the eastern part of Saguaro National Park, where I drove the loop road, with a few stops to take photos and/or hike short trails. Here, have some more cactus pictures:
I did stop in at the visitor center to look at their exhibits, get the other stamp, and ask a ranger a question. Namely, you sometimes see saguaros with arms pointing down, instead of up, and I wanted to know what caused that. The ranger said it was due to cold weather. Though he didn’t sound really confident of that.
I flew back early on Monday, with a longish layover in Houston. No upgrades on the way home, alas. A minor annoyance is that most restaurants at IAH have gone to the “scan a QR code” system, instead of having actual service. Which would be fine, if the app they used actually worked for payment, instead of taking ages to come back with a time-out error message. I did eventually manage to flag down a waitress and was able to pay her, but I was still annoyed. People at airports might actually have somewhere they are trying to get to and don’t necessarily have an extra half hour to futz around with buggy software.
Despite that, I did have a very good trip. I spent time with friends and saw some cool stuff, which is about what a weekend away should include. I still believe that people are mostly water and, hence, are not intended to live in the desert, but I do appreciate why some people like it.
I went to Tucson the weekend before last. The reason for the trip was a FlyerTalk event, essentially a Sunday brunch. Since I had never been to Tucson before, I figured I could leverage off that as an excuse to spend a couple of days there.
I flew out on Thursday, which gave me an opportunity to use the newish silver line metro route to IAD. I had not thought to check the schedule, however, so arrived at East Falls Church to see a 40 minute wait. Since it was cold out, I continued on to Ballston to wait in more comfort. Fortunately, I had enough time to get to IAD for my flight.
Anyway, I flew via Houston, and managed to get upgraded on both flights, which was nice. I had less luck with the rental car. I had reserved a compact car with Budget, but, after a long wait, they stuck me with a full-size car. I stayed at the Towne Place Suites by the airport, which I chose only because hotel prices were very high, presumably due to the Gem and Mineral Show going on in town. The hotel was perfectly fine for what it was and was surprisingly quiet for an airport hotel.
On Friday, I got together with my friend, Joel. We’ve known each other on-line for decades, via a humor-oriented mailing list, but had never met in person before. He has a membership to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is generally considered one of the top attractions of the area, so we headed there. We got there in time to see the Raptor Free Flight, which involved a talk and demonstration with several Harris’s hawks, that flew right over our heads. Most of them were, in fact, too close to photograph, but I did get this picture of one overhead.
We walked around much of the site, which is fairly large. Some of the things we saw were otters (hard to get decent pictures of) and hummingbirds. We failed to see a javelina. We did, however, see a big-horned sheep.
Right after I told Joel I doubted we would see a coyote, this guy decided to prove me wrong.
This being the Sonoran desert, there were, of course, lots of cacti.
There was also a boojum tree, which Joel described as “an upside-down carrot.” Of course, I had to make a snarky comment about it. (I hope at least a few of you know your Lewis Carroll well enough to understand this.)
Other things we did (in no particular order) included having coffee and lunch, looking at reptiles, walking through the aviary, and stopping at their art gallery, where I particularly liked these paintings by Diane Bennett done on old metal signs.
After several hours at the Museum, we returned to the car. Joel took a leisurely drive through the western part of Saguaro National Park (with a stop at the visitor center for me to stamp my National Park passport) before he dropped me off back at my hotel.
I am one of those people who always browses the racks of brochures at tourist info centers and next to hotel elevators and flips through the magazines that tell you of things to do. That led to me being reminded of the existence of Biosphere 2. Not many of you know this, but I had a traineeship in graduate school that was funded by NASA’s Closed Environmental Life Support Systems (CELSS) project. So this was something I felt more or less obliged to see. It’s now owned by the University of Arizona and is focused on more general environmental research, not oriented towards created closed systems for use in space. The history of it is interesting and somewhat bizarre and controversial, though the more salacious parts of the story were definitely downplayed at the site. I highly recommend reading the wikipedia page if you’re interested in how it went wrong.
Anyway, it was about an hour drive north of my hotel. You download an app that has various clips you can watch during the 23 stop self-guided tour, which takes you around several parts of the site. Here is an overview of the site.
You go through the human habitat, which includes a kitchen, library, labs, and apartments. The latter actually looked more comfortable than I expected.
This is the exterior of the domes with the controlled environments, which include coastal fog desert, thorn scrub, mangroves, lower savana, ocean, savana, and rainforest.
I wish I’d been able to get a decent picture of the ocean. It used to have a coral reef, but that has completely died and not been replaced yet. I did get a reasonable picture of the rainforest.
Another brochure I’d seen was for the Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures. I like dollhouses to begin with and the brochure featured a particularly intriguing one, so I couldn’t resist.
That’s right - the Addams Family Mini Mansion, made by Ara Bentley. It has wonderful detail and was alone enough to justify the price of admission to the museum. I mean, just look at Cousin Itt in the leftmost room on the second floor. It’s a brilliant piece of art.
There is, of course, a lot more normal stuff to see. Here, for example, is a Gone With the Wind diorama.
Another impressive piece was this sculpture carved out of a pencil point.
And, getting more topical, Remarkable Presence by Jen Urso commemorates people who died of COVID-19.
All in all, the museum had quite a lot to see and I recommend it to anyone who appreciates miniatures.
Moving on to Sunday, I lazed around in the morning for a while, reading and doing puzzles, before heading off to Micha’s to meet the Flyertalk crowd for brunch. The food was pretty good and the conversation was lively and amusing.
After brunch, I drove to the eastern part of Saguaro National Park, where I drove the loop road, with a few stops to take photos and/or hike short trails. Here, have some more cactus pictures:
I did stop in at the visitor center to look at their exhibits, get the other stamp, and ask a ranger a question. Namely, you sometimes see saguaros with arms pointing down, instead of up, and I wanted to know what caused that. The ranger said it was due to cold weather. Though he didn’t sound really confident of that.
I flew back early on Monday, with a longish layover in Houston. No upgrades on the way home, alas. A minor annoyance is that most restaurants at IAH have gone to the “scan a QR code” system, instead of having actual service. Which would be fine, if the app they used actually worked for payment, instead of taking ages to come back with a time-out error message. I did eventually manage to flag down a waitress and was able to pay her, but I was still annoyed. People at airports might actually have somewhere they are trying to get to and don’t necessarily have an extra half hour to futz around with buggy software.
Despite that, I did have a very good trip. I spent time with friends and saw some cool stuff, which is about what a weekend away should include. I still believe that people are mostly water and, hence, are not intended to live in the desert, but I do appreciate why some people like it.
