We enjoyed our campsite at Colossal Cave so much we decided to try another Pima County park, Gilbert Ray Campgrounds in Tucson Mountain park. It was larger and nearly empty, allowing us to choose from quite a few sites. Driving in we noticed it was on the way to the Desert Museum, one of the places we’d visited in the past and wanted to see again this trip, so we paid for a second night and drove to the museum on Sunday morning.
The museum is actually part museum, part botanical gardens and part zoo. It has a large reptile exhibit, a prairie dog habitat, rocky mountain goats, cactus and agave gardens, aviaries, rocks and gems, a desert loop path – all contained in a sprawling area connected by paved (and some unpaved) winding paths. There were plenty of places to wander and benches to sit on so we wound up spending four hours learning more about the desert environment we’ve been spending so much of the past few weeks in.
On Monday we packed up and started our drive to Phoenix to stay with Doug, hopefully visit Joe McLaren and Charlie Zarelli and to start making plans for leaving the van for the summer. In planning our route on the road map I happened to notice that we would pass right by Biosphere 2 so we added a visit there to our itinerary. Now I remember reading about the two groups of people that made Biosphere their home between 1991 and 1993. They were sealed into this remarkable 3 acre glass enclosed facility where they farmed, raised livestock and tried to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. The original project faced many unexpected problems and had to terminate prematurely but there were many lessons learned by the scientific community from this experiment. Currently owned and operated by the University of Arizona as a research and educational facility, Biosphere 2 continues to contribute by conducting experiments in hydroponic agriculture, coral reef hybridization and CO2 utilization among others. Fascinating place.
We finally reached Phoenix at about 7:30, had pizza and retired to Doug’s guest house to spend the next couple of days.
The Ultimate Road Trip 