TUSCON ... The Vacation

Cutter's Log - Stardate 9002.26.30
Current Song - Jack and Jill (Raydio)

I returned from a 6-day trip to Tucson on Saturday afternoon.

I'm going to put here an account of what I did down there. But first I'm going to tell about the journey there.

I woke up at 2:45 AM on March 16 and left for Quad City Airport at 3:30. The flight was set to take off at 6:20. I wasn't worried about flying as much as I was about my baggage. The screening process wasn't all that bad. I was worrying about it being lost.

As a larger person, I had a difficult time buckling up. It took me up until just before take off to get myself in. I looked out the window the entire flight, and tried to identify the cities below me (I only got Des Moines right - I thought Omaha was Kansas City, and Ottumwa was actually Riverside.) The thought of throwing up didn't come up.

The layover in Denver was interesting. My Uncle Randy was departing to D.C. a couple of hours after I was. We had breakfast at a place called Pour la France. I picked up a Denver Post, read the Woody Paige piece, and completed by NCAA bracket somewhere above New Mexico.

Grandpa and Grandma were so excited to see me, and vice versa. It is so dry there! We got to their place, in a neighborhood called San Carlos Place. They live in a gues house, in the back of a full-sized house. We talked about things back home, gave them our newspaper (and my QC). Our first trip was to downtown Tucson to see the historical sites. Some of the things we saw were the Presidio, the La Placita, the older part of Tucson, the Hotel Congress, the Cup Cafe, and a couple of others. We also walked down Fourth Street, which is a University hangout (I think). We had dinner at a place called Magpies. The place has been voted the best pizza for 20 years running.

We went to a White Sox spring training game on Tuesday. Well, they were the visiting team. The Diamondbacks were the hosts. I packed with me some baseball cards to get signed. I notched two signatures: Ozzie Guillen (on my 1997 Collector's Choice) and Wilson Betemit (on my 2000 Fleer Tradition). I almost got AJ Peryzinski to sign. It was a very good game, going into extras before a wild pitch by Lance Broadway sent in the winning D-Back run.

We also walked around the University of Arizona part of Tuesday. There is also a huge used bookstore called Bookmans. Every book there is used, and priced half-off the cover. I bought 8 books, and 1 of them was a fiction book. I never, never read fiction. I can picture my mother living in this store. There is also a pass through the mountains called Gate's Pass. The sunset is really beautiful there. Dinner was at a place called Tiny's. It used to be a saloon at one time.

Wednesday was spent at Mount Lemmon. Tucson is 3/4 surrounded my mountains. This is the most accessible one going up. We had a picnic up there with Daggwood sandwiches (just like the comic strip). I called back home from the top. Before we went to Lemmon, we went to the transportation museum in downtown.

Thursday was a very good day. We went to the Tucson-Sonora Desert Museum. It is an environmental museum filled with animals, plants, birds, and many walking trails. My skin was about to turn bad as we walked around. Not too far from the desert is Old Tucson. That's where many old westerns were filmed, such as McClintock. The Three Amigos was also filmed there, as well as The High Chaparall. We also went to one of the Indian Casinos, Desert Diamond. I didn't do as good as the past weekend's run in East Peoria. Dinner was at a place called the Depot, which I didn't know had karakoke night - as it pained my ears.

We spent most of Friday at the Pima Air and Space Museum. The place is HUGE! It has Ike's post-WWII to pre-presidency airplane, Kennedy and Johnson's Air Force One, and many military fighting planes. There are over 100 planes outside, and another 100 I think in a few hangars. The hangars also included some Air Force history. There was also the Space part of the museum, which documents the history of space travel. I wrote a paper in seventh grade science class about space travel history, so it interested me a lot. There was better music for our final dinner of the trip. We went to Las Cazulitas, where a live Marachi band was playing.

Saturday I bid goodbye to my grandparents and headed back home though Denver again.

Tucson is a very big city, much bigger that I thought. There were a lot of things I wanted to do, but was unable to. I want to go back one day. But my grandparents, who btw live there for three months, are looking at another place to spend the winter at.

Nevertheless, this will go down as one of the best weeks of my life.

Pictures will come soon, I promise. I got the Internet back at home (WOO-HOO!!!!!!) and need to get caught up on everything.

If you want to know more about my vacation, go ahead and ask.

TUCSON PICTURES - http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=22721799&albumId=2692130