Day Six: Saguaro National Park in Tucson, AZ

At this point, we just gave up trying to get anywhere on the schedule we planned. We had cancelled our hotel reservation for Sunday night and decided we'd spend time in Saguaro National Park then try to get down the road.

We entered Arizona from New Mexico:

The mountains were pretty cool. They looked like a bulldozer had just pushed a whole bunch of huge rocks together in the middle of fields of sand.

Although it was quite alluring, we skipped the exit that would have allowed us to find out what "THE THING!??" was:

Saguaro National Park is divided into two districts, separated in the middle by the city of Tucson. I have a national park "passport" book that my dad bought me where you collect the stamps at the different ranger stations at national parks and national monuments, so I wanted to go to both ranger stations to get both stamps. We went to the east station first. As we approached, we started seeing the saguaro cactus.

At the east side visitor center we saw a "cactus skeleton". Apparently inside the cactus is this woody structure that supports the whole plant. The saguaro is amazing. If a bird burrows inside of the cactus it has the ability to heal itself around the bird's nest. There was also an example of where someone had stuck a bottle into the cactus (rim side first) and then broken the bottle off, then the cactus just enclosed the entire bottle rim and healed around it.

Saguaro cactus are also REALLY old:

So this guy is probably like 200 years old. How incredible. The entire cactus is covered in prickly spines. You can see at the top that it's the right season for the cactus to bloom. We saw some in bloom and many in bud. But because the cactus are so tall before they bloom, it was hard to get a good look at the blossoms.

Instead of tree forests, there are cactus forests.

It was so hot outside that the javelinas hang out in the shade of the visitor center.

Also, in all the bathrooms, there were sunscreen dispensers. That's how serious the sun is there.

We then headed to the west side of the park, on the other side of Tucson. We resisted the urge to stop and see the cross-legged Ronald McDonald...

...and drove into the cactus-filled wilderness. The road was in the middle of nowhere and was like a rollercoaster, it had so many dips!

We actually didn't end up spending much time in the west side of the park, except to take some pictures.

The park mostly offered scenic drives and backcountry camping, so instead, we went to the Sonora Desert Museum, which was actually probably my favorite part of our whole trip. It was more of a zoo/aquarium than a museum! Here are some pictures. It'd take forever for me to label all of them, so just enjoy, and let me know if you have questions about anything in the pictures.

The bird below is an American Kestrel.

These are the coolest fish I've seen in a while. They're called garden eels.

There was a hummingbird aviary:

Added bonus: we saw this little guy outside of the exhibits!

  There was also a regular aviary.

Here's what I'd look like if I were a turtle:

We watched a showdown between this bobcat and a squirrel. Nothing happened, but the bobcat was poised to attack as soon as the squirrel took one unfortunate step:

Here's a very zoomed in picture of a saguaro blossom.

This is called an organ pipe cactus:

They had a really neat geology exhibit too.

They also had bat ears for you to try on. These are proportionate to the size of a bat's body (if a bat was my size, its ears would be this big). You really could hear a lot more when you tried on the bat ears!

We decided to make it an early night and stay in Phoenix a couple hours away, since we stayed in Tucson until after 5pm. We had an awesome Greek dinner. Seriously, some of the best Greek I've ever had. 

The place we stayed in Phoenix was really nice too. We slept well.

Obviously we are a couple days behind and are trying to do the posts in order, but in case you're wondering, our first day at work was today and everything went fine! We'll write more about it later but we're looking forward to our projects and all our coworkers seem really nice, so that's good.

By the way, we're planning on keeping this blog up over the summer as well. We want to do some weekend traveling, so stay tuned even after we're done posting about the trip!