Day One & Day Two

Yesterday started out cold and early. I didn't sleep at all the night before because I stayed up so late anyways and wanted to sleep on the plane. At 5am I finished packing and made it down to the Straz lobby by 6am (because I had somehow managed to convince myself that that was the time we were supposed to leave--good thing too, I would've been late). The airport was fine, my bag did get searched, luckily they found nothing. I sat in the fifteenth row in between Prof. Arion and a student from the University of Arizona. I slept for the first half, obviously exhausted from the lack of sleep. For the second half Arion and I looked at pictures from his travels and different places he's lived throughout his life, if you get a chance ask to see them. All were very interesting and beautiful. We arrived and went directly to El Indio, a local Mexican restaurant with excellent food. Thereafter, we arrived at our hotel and decided to work off all those wonderful calories with a nice hike up a mountain. We didn't make it very far because we had to be back before sundown. However, it was an wonderful journey with gorgeous scenery. The video doesn't do it justice. Afterwards, Justin, Eric, Melissa, Ryan, and myself all headed out to find swimming gear and other small necessities. We went to a local mall and they had a Fondue Kiosk there, it was essential that I had one. Strawberries and Marshmallows! Yum! Finally we found a black one piece in my size and could venture on down to the hot tub, where we met some other nice people at the hotel who were in Tuscon to buy a bus they wanted to convert into an RV. Different. But interesting. I crashed around 10pm completely exhausted. All in all a great first day!

On day two (Sunday), we woke up bright and early and began our adventures at 9am. First, we drove to the grocery store and picked up a few sandwich snacks for our later lunch. Thereafter, we promptly drove through the beautiful mountains to reach the Desert museum, only taking one quick pit stop to take in the view. Once there we split up into a few groups and had ourselves a look. I had only been there once before with my family when I was 11 years old, I was still just as fascinated. I struggled a bit during the reptile show, who knew I could be so sleepy around such dangerous animals. Afterwards though, we went to the gift shop and I got some coffee in me we were good to go. The group then went down to the raptor hawk show at 2pm, probably the most amazing bird showing I've ever seen. At one point the hawk flew low enough to brush its tail feathers over my hair, half terrified-half terribly excited. My favorite was, and always is at every zoo, the prairie dogs. These ones were especially fun because they were so fat and laid on the ground looking like they were "swimming" towards me (they were stretching is what the zookeeper said, however I like to think they just wanted a nice big hug). That night we went to the restaurant Sweet Tomato, a salad buffet. It was delicious, I especially enjoyed that the entire group sat there for approx. 3 hours and just has some nice quality conversation.