We did do a lot more walking Sunday, because we visited the Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon. We'd been here in the early 1970s, and the Museum has continued to grow more beautiful. It's a wonderful place, celebrating the geology and biology of the desert, located on the side of Tuscon Mountain, and teeming with exotic plants and animals in natural settings. In addition to some excellent signs explaining the exhibits, there were quite a few docents adding enthusiasm and interest. One surprising item is that coatis have migrated north from Central America, and are now beginning to be found in the nearby desert.
Especially for someone unfamiliar with the Southwestern desert, the Desert Museum is an outstanding depiction of the strange water-preserving cactus, snakes and scorpions, coyotes and panthers, lizards and javelinas, to be found around Tuscon.
Later last night we talked about the changing rhythm of our travels. We have not been sightseeing as intently as when we were in Europe or Eastern Canada. There are several different reasons for this. We have had (and will have) lots of personal business to attend to: months of backlogged mail, a change of mailing address, refilling prescriptions by mail, taxes and bill paying, visits to friends and family, and traveling from Boston back to Texas and on to California at a much faster pace than we traveled around Europe or Canada.
We've resolved to slow down and make longer stays in cities that interest us, but this won't start for another month, while we continue to make visits to friends and family, get our medical checkups, and catch up on more chores.
The long and the short of that is that our emails may be shorter, less frequent, and with only an occasional sightseeing excursion. Perhaps some of you will be grateful not to receive long daily emails with lots of slow-downloading pictures such as we sent to Europe. Others might miss the travelogues. But we're still trying to find the right pace to enjoy our nomadic life, learn about new places, and still have time to think and write and reflect on what we are learning.