Setting up the southwest base

We've spent the better part of 90 days attempting to complete the creation of our southwest living base. It hasn't been easy.

However, this week it came to pass. We had the Redwood Cypress put into position on our location. This is something that we began in 2002, declared in 2007 and today 14 years after those tentative steps. we have achieved this goal.

The Redwood is now added to our living possibilities. 

Here is the way it looked a short time ago:

It has been a long journey/

Pima Air & Space Museum

Our Tucson area trek included a visit to the Pima Air & Space Museum.

It's my understanding that Pima is the largest privately-funded, nongovernmental air & space museum. In the U.S. only the Smithsonian and The National Museum of the Air Force at Wright-Patterson are larger. Pima has a variety of military and civilian/commercial aircraft on display numbering  300+. It has several indoor hangars, plus outside walking tours (on your own or even via a tram).

We did the tram ride and it was most informative. It takes about an hour and I recommend it to get a wonderful overview of the outside exhibits. Our guide was a former Air Force pilot who described the aircraft and provided some very interesting anecdotal information. This allowed us to decide which to later walk to in order to get a better and more detailed view. Far too many aircraft inside and outside to post here, so here is a sampling.

We ran the lunar lander simulator and got scores of 13 and 15. We ended our tour with a walk on the moon!

There's ample parking and we were in the "overflow" lot which is also for RVs. We could have fit within the normal lot, but the walking distance was slight and so we decided to park with the Class A's.

After the tram ride we took a short walking tour on our own:

The museum includes exhibits of both fixed wing and rotating aircraft, and interactive stuff.

Original material:  https://roadtrek210.blogspot.com/

More Tucson Outdoor Photos

More photos from our Tucson area trek:

There's a busy bee in this photo:

Tucson Raptors

The Arizona-Sonoma Desert Museum has a wonderful raptors in flight exhibit. No cages, just free-flying birds and amazed onlookers. The raptors include a variety of owls and hawks:

This hawk flew just above my head; I was standing about three feet behind the handler. The photo was taken with a wide-angle lens and so this bird was much closer than it appears in the photo. She settled on a saguaro directly behind me.

One of the hawks took a treat to a nearby saguaro before returning soaring. At one time there were four hawks pirouetting and dazzling the crowd. On the day we attended the museum there were two raptor in flight shows. One in the morning and another in the afternoon. The morning had several owls and a red-tailed hawk. The afternoon had four hawks.

Tucson Rainbow

We took a couple of days to settle in, get to know our surroundings and meet some of the neighbors.

The day began at 50F with a wonderful rainbow and it just got better and better.