Arizona Thanksgiving
Part 4: Pima Air Museum & Thanksgiving Day
I met the Melsons for breakfast the next morning and then went for a hike up the "A Mountain"! I literally thought it was gonna be a hike hike, so I prepared for the worst, but in reality you drove most of the way up and had a tremendous view of Tucson! There was a trail up to the top, and the kids all took the short cut over the lava rocks (and straight up the hill), but Liz and I stayed on the main trail. We eventually made it to the "A", a colorful letter A built by U of A people way back in 1915 or thereabouts, but the trail up was just as dicey, so Liz and I decided to head down to the road. The others eventually made it down and they all found the other trail, but I walked back along the main road because the trail involved a climb up a couple of boulders!
View of South Tucson from the "A" Mountain (downtown Tucson is above)
Floyd and the boys scramble to the top (of course) while Liz and I took the easy trail to the mid-point of the "A".
The "A" from ground level with the Melsons scrambling back down...
Gazebo back at the parking lot
Headed over to Liz's neighbors Sue and Jerry’s after that for an absolutely scrumptious Thanksgiving feast! The next day we went to the Pima Air Museum, and that was quite fascinating; many veterans were there volunteering and leading tours, and Liz and I ended up chatting with a pilot who was actually captured by the Germans (he wasn’t shot down, but all his engines failed). That was actually a good thing, because civilians didn’t abide by the Geneva Convention; only the military did! But they were still incarcerated after the war; evidently the Russians kept them there for awhile, then released them later! Some of those planes were quite fascinating, including the Guppy, which was a cargo plane.
"Okay, so where do we go first?" Carwyn goes straight for the flight simulator! Floyd, Mark, and Liz pose in front of a Lear jet
Liz poses outside Kennedy’s Air Force One Bohden’s favorite helicopter, the Crane
Floyd and Liz next to a giant seaplane "No, Carwyn, I don’t care how many times Cactus Wren
you flew the simulator—you can’t fly that
jet back to Goleta!"
The "Guppy", a "whale" of a cargo plane! Floyd checks out the replica of our solar system
imbedded in the sidewalk
We stopped at Wendy’s for lunch (I should have followed Liz’s example and had a salad), then I headed home to crash before meeting the crowd at the motel to carpool to Metropolitan Grille for dinner with Liz's friend Arlene. Actually, I got waylaid in the parking lot: the bushes were full of little violet flowers that had Marine, Pygmy, Reakirt’s, and Ceraunus Blues, in addition to both Painted and West Coast Ladies and another Southern Dogface! After tearing myself away from that we headed over to the restaurant, which was a lot of fun; I had the rack of lamb, so I really stuffed myself that day…
Butterflies hanging around the La Quinta parking lot...
Common Blue Ceraunus Blue Western Pygmy Blue
Reakirt’s Blue with a chomped wing
Marine Blues
Dainty Sulphur American Snout Sleepy Orange
This could be either a Common Checkered or White Checkered Skipper; the only way to tell the difference is through dissection! Other
checkered skippers have less pattern on the underwing.
Painted Ladies The similar West
Coast Lady; note the
blue "eyes"
The Southern Dogface gets its name from the "poodle" pattern on the upperside of the wing (although on this individual it looks more
human…). Since these butterflies don’t rest with open wings you rarely get to see this pattern unless it’s backlit (center).