Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

This is a beautiful desert park "museum ". We arrived early, shortly after it opened, to walk the distance to see the wild bird free flight demonstration at 10:00am. We were entertained by Mexican ravens, a horned owl, a Harris Hawk and a red tailed hawk.

The wonderful part of this outdoor museum is that all the activities and demonstrations are provided by "Docents", extensively trained volunteers. We met several as we wandered along the pathways between the different venues. They wander around being available for information and direction. This lady is a retired school teacher and decided she would like, one, to learn more about the place in which she lives and also to give back and share her teaching skills.

The museum provides 'docent' training for a period of 15 weeks. After that your time is totally volunteered. There are over 500 'docent' volunteers that make your visit a truly wonderful experience

For the rest of the day we wandered the museum grounds. It is hard to describe this place when it is called a museum. It is a spectacular outdoor presentation of all that is wonderful about the desert. We spent 5 hours enjoying the variety of cactus, desert animals and bird life.

How is that for a spectacularly unique cactus.

We returned back to the Casino camp feeling like we had had a wonderful day and went in for our last buffet dinner. We overheard a table close to us talking about Comox!!. As we were leaving I had to ask and we were so pleasantly welcomed by two couples, Lynn and Gerry Gagne, a retired Campbell River forest service worker from Blackcreek and Murielle and Erik, expatriates who now live full time in Tucson. How cool is that, my two best friends for all my life are Lynn and Muriel. These ladies may be my doppelgänger best friends. Serendipitous meetings:)

We had a horrendous "ugly generator" night that definitely made our decision to move on a necessity for us this morning.

After 110 miles from west Tucson through the Tohono O'Odham nation lands we are now settled in the BLM camp just south of Why on the the highway to Organ Pipe National Monument and the border crossing at Lukeville/Sonoyta. The quiet is deafining....our favourite birds are scouting out our suet feeders, seed balls and hummer feeders. Tomorrow morning the word will be out and they will all be here to entertain us. We hope to enjoy the peace, long walks and quiet afternoons with the rabbits, coyotes and bird life for at least a week or two ..

 

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