Musings in Tucson

We arrived in Tucson last Friday after spending a night and the day just outside the Saguaro National Park.  The Gilbert Ray campground was awesome and just a couple of miles away from the Sonoran Desert Museum.  We've been to this outdoor museum in the past and always enjoy it.  If you've never been, add it to your list of places to see.  It's almost entirely outdoors and has an amazing variety of cacti and animals and reptiles.  We could only spend a couple of hours as we didn't want to leave the boys alone.

We've been visiting son Jay, his girlfriend Nora and their respective families since our arrival in Tucson.  We found an RV park close to downtown and conveniently near a couple of grocery and other stores, too.  Nora, granddaughter Melanie and I enjoyed the annual Fourth Avenue Street Winter Festival last Sunday, with lots of artists displaying their artwork and food vendors galore.  

Now for the musings:  While crossing the desert from Joshua Tree National Forest in California, we noticed lots of abandoned shacks and Jim mentioned folks used to homestead.  It caused me to look it up the other night and I learned about the Jackrabbit Homestead and Small Tract Act of 1938.  We even found a YouTube video about it dated June 27, 2013.  The act ended (or was repealed?) and it appears, like many good ideas, that it wasn't necessarily a good thing for the 'settlers' or the environment.  It was, however, an interesting piece of history to learn.  We didn't, however, stop to take any photos.  Trust us - they were mostly just shacks!

Our other observation is about what appears to be a woeful lack of recycling in both California and Arizona.  Apparently many communities either never started or gave up trying to get their residents to be active and responsible for their own recycling and supposedly do the recycle thing at the local landfill.  I wonder if that's actually true?   In Arizona thus far, it seems very much like a hit or miss option, with apparently no repercussions to residents if they don't recycle.  Our years in Washington State have us both trained and attuned to the need and ease of recycling, and it just kills us not to be able to recycle while we travel.  For a while, I was hauling it with us in the RV, hoping the next stop would have a recycle bin, but the RV is just too small to accommodate that.  We do add, however, that most of the Federal, State and County parks where we've camped have had basic recycle bins available.  

We're not sure where we'll head next - east and south for sure, in search of warmer weather.   The photos below are mostly from the Sonoran desert.