Tucson - Day Trip from Phoenix

Saguaro National Park is a nice drive-through experience of the Arizona Desert.

Reid Park Zoo is small but nicely kept up with lots of nicely displayed animals.

Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is a nice walk through museum of the Arizona Desert and some of the animals that inhabit it.

And, of course, for us, quilt shops. Several nice ones plus one that have an extremely high opinion of itself.

Quick Tips:

If you do this as day trips from Phoenix like we did, leave Phoenix early (6 A.M.) and beat the Phoenix rush hour, plan breakfast en route north of Tucson, and arrive in Tucson on the tailend of their rush hour. Worked great for us.

Best Way To Get Around:

As a day trip our way definitely needed a car. Plus there is enough distance between Saguaro NP and the Sonora Desert Museum that they need to be on separate days.

A very nice drive through the desert as it actually exists. Everything growing here is just the way it would actually be if the park did not exist. The main thing the National Park Service has done is put in roads with a minimum of disruption to the desert so you can drive through and see what life in the desert is like.

There is a nice visitor center where you enter the park with a nice exhibit explaining the different types of deserts and what kind of desert is contained within the Park itself.

By the visitor center is a small walk through Desert Garden where you can see the various kinds of desert plant life up close.

The visitor center and walk through Desert Garden are free. The eight mile drive through loop costs $6.00 per vehicle unless you have one of the National Park Service's special passes, such as the Golden Eagle Pass which costs $50.00 for one year and lets you into all the Parks, or a Golden Age Passport if you are 62 or older which costs $10.00 one time and lets you visit all the parks for the rest of your life.

A small but very nice museum in the middle of a nicely maintained park.

We spent about an hour and a half at this zoo. The animals were nicely displayed and appeared to be well cared for. Easy to walk through as the total acreage is small.

This zoo is reciprocal to members of many zoos Friends of the Zoo Organizations, which makes it very economical for them.

Within Tucson are a number of very nice quilt shops with excellent selections of 100% cotton quilting fabrics, books, patterns, and supplies.

Most of the shops also have a number of samples hung through out them.

One shop is definitely over enamored with itself with prices on fabrics being considerable out of line (high) to what experienced quilters expect to pay.

To find information on specific shops in and around Tucson, see my Journal on Quilter's Travels.

This Mission is a beautiful, still functioning mission to the people in the area.

It is a large, white edifice which is very striking to behold. Touring the inside finds lots of domes, carvings, murals, and a very impressive altar.

Self guided tours allow you to go through the mission at your own pace and appreciate the beauty and grandeur of it.

This is a very nice walk through the desert experience. It is strictly walk through, but you can experience the whole thing in a couple of hours. The walking is easy with nicely maintained paths.

Intermixed with walking through the desert plant life are exhibits of live animals who actually live within the desert environment. Of course, you can also see some wild wildlife roaming free as this is just an area within the real desert.

There is a small mine exhibit, easy to walk through with cased exhibits of the various gems and semi-precious stones that are actually mined in the desert area. At the exit from the mine exhibit is an area of small rocks which the museum seeds with small semi-precious stones for you to search for and they let each person keep a couple of the stones they find. This is fun for the kids who generally like to look for such things.

Lots of docents are within the grounds to explain things and answer questions. They day we were there one docent had a screech owl out where you could really get an up close and personal look at it, plus learn about it from the docent.

A nice job of labeling the plant life throughout the museum, although you have to remember the names as they just label some so that at some point you can find the name of any plant you see.

Go early in the day before it becomes too hot as there is no shade as you walk through the museum, and as the day heats up it can get very hot. We went in late October and were there at opening time. It was very pleasant. At that time of year, the afternoon highs appear to get into the 70's so that even afternoons would probably not be too bad, unless you're subject to sunburning very easily.