The teens and I took a quick trip to Tucson at the end of May. The older teen is deciding which colleges to apply to this Fall. We’ve done some pretty great virtual tours of universities during the pandemic, but it is hard to get a feel of a place online. Plus, I wanted to introduce them to the almost summer heat of the desert in May before they commit to moving halfway across the country. So, we masked up and drove the 17 hours both ways.
We stayed in a little casita just off Himmel Park in Tucson. A branch of the public library was just across the street from our rental. Himmel Park is full of huge old palm and olive trees in between all the community space and is hopping with activity from early morning to dark except during the hottest part of the late afternoon when most people take it easy in the desert.
We spent most of a morning wandering around the University of Arizona campus on our own. The rest of the trip we spent visiting my favorite parts of Tucson from when we lived there: the eastern side of Saguaro National Park, B & B Cactus Farms where we bought just one large-ish cactus to bring home with us, Tucson Botanical Gardens where the artichokes and saguaros were blooming and the younger teen was happy about all the lizards, Bookman’s used books where the older teen could have spent the rest of the day and a quick look around the 4th Avenue area.
We broke up the long hours on the road with a few interesting stops along the way: White Sands National Monument on the way out to Tucson.
White Sands again on the road back, the “largest pistachio in the world”, Roswell UFO Museum and Historic Route 66 in Tucumcari. As always, I’m glad we went and I’m glad to be back home.
