Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (123) - (from Tucson)

On Monday the 3rd we drove to the Tucson visitor’s centre in the CBD and purchased two Tucson passports. These passports were only $15 each and offered discounts at almost 40 tourist locations. From there we drove to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum where we immediately saved $18 in entrance fees thanks to the passport.

It was a fascinating outdoors museum that had many different displayed of cacti and flora and fauna found in the Sonora deserts. We learnt that deserts in California were very different to the types of desert in Arizona – here, the Sonora deserts has Saguaro (pronounced: sa-WAH-ro) cacti which are the tall cacti with human type arms growing from the sides, bent at the elbow and pointing sky ward and the Californian deserts had Joshua trees. The Saguaro cacti don’t start growing their “arms” till they’re about 70 years old, and the ones you see with arms growing off other arms can be up to 250 years old.

Chantelle would like to recall her visit there, and as she has to write a weekly journal for school, I’ll copy Chantelle’s recollection without editing:

First we bought a tracking animals book. It is where you put stamps in allocated places. Then we went to a reptiles and invertebrates room. We saw cool lizards, bugs, snakes and spiders. They were hardly moving except the snakes and they would follow your hands. My favourite snake is the King snake which is gold.

We walked a little bit and went inside a cave; though it wasn’t real it was pretty cool. There were a lot of tight spaces.

Then we went to an Earth Science centre (within the museum) which is about earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, rock, earth’s landscape and how much earth has changed in 200 billion years. My favourite room in there was the rock room. It is filled with all different types of rocks, even silver and gold!

When we finished in there we walked around and looked at lots of animals. First we saw a pretty parrot, it was green. Then we saw a mountain lion, it was big and caramel.
On the other side were white tailed deer because the bottom of their tail is white and there is a white spot on their bottom. There were two deer. We also saw an owl, it is small and sleeping. Next to that was a Mexican wolf, it was sleeping too. My favourite animal was the racoon because it kept playing with a ball and putting his food bowl on his head and sitting in it and throwing it.

At 2pm we went to a snack bar to have lunch. I had a hot dog and a chocolate milkshake. It was delicious. After our delicious lunch we kept walking. We got to a section with giant bees, moths and butterflies. The good thing is that the giant bees don’t sting.

Next we went to my second favourite part of the park. It is the hummingbird’s room. It was beautiful; every little hummingbird had a special colour and song.

Then we went underground into a place called “Life underground”. There are real live animals in there. You can see them hibernating. I liked the mice the most because they are so cute when they are sleeping.

Then we went into a bird aviary. It had all types of birds like big birds, small birds and ducks. I liked the ducks best because they kept dunking their heads in the water and made funny noises.
After that were the big horn sheep. One of them was staring right at me! It was freaky.

We also saw an otter. It was funny because it kept doing the swimming stroke “dolphin kick”. It also kept pushing off the wall and diving down deep.

It is almost dusk when we started to walk a loop trail. There weren’t so many animals, only Javelinas. It wasn’t long before the trail loop was finished so we went to the gift shop. I got two small pencils with a lot of small rocks in a tube on the top.

It is now dusk and we are heading home. I think today was a fantastic day and I hope to do something like it soon.

ENDS

Prior to our visit, we were told that we should allow about 3 hours looking about this museum. We spent almost 6 and only left because dusk was encroaching and with it, the cold desert night. A great day was had by all; it’s certainly worth visiting if you have the chance.

That night we saw an advertisement on the TV that said the Harlem Globetrotters were coming to Tucson on Monday the 17th. As I had seen and enjoyed them when I was a lot younger (about 100 years ago according to the girls) this meant staying in the campground an additional ten nights that wasn’t an unnecessary burden at all as the weather was expected to be great and there were so many more places for us to visit. Thus, we booked tickets and extended our stay again to leave on the 18th, three weeks in one place that had set a new record for us.