A Southern Road Trip

This morning Gordon said he wanted to go and do something today. He had found another Mission (photo below) south of Green Valley, AZ at the Tumacacori National Historic Park. On the way south we stopped at the Tourist Bureau in Green Valley to pick up some information.

I'm not a history buff so these Mission trips do little for me however I went in and took some photos. There is an orchard there so I looked there for birds and did see a cardinal again. My sister thinks that our Mother has been reincarnated as a cardinal as she loved cardinals when she was alive and had cardinal everything inside and outside the house. So I'm wondering, what was our Mother doing at a Catholic Mission?

Prior to going to the Mission we got off I-19 at a town called Tubac. I had never heard of Tubac before but its an arts and crafts town. We drove around it and this is on our list to go back to while we're here. From there we drove south to Nogales, AZ which borders the Mexican town of Nogales, MX. From there we took Hwy 82 north to Patagonia and paid our $7.00 to go into the Patagonia Lake State Park. We had our picnic lunch there that I had prepared. We decided that most of the sites there would not accommodate our RV. The lake itself was quite pretty and had a very steep walking bridge that crosses part of Patagonia Lake. We stopped at the Visitor Center and was told there was a birding trail at the far end of the park so off we went to the trail (photo on the left and photo below). It was quite pretty walking along the lake and we did see some ducks and coots and a couple other small birds that we couldn't identify but other than that we saw cows! I've never been in a State Park before that had cows but they were nice cows. I thought though that where there are cows, there's a bull and sure enough we walked a little further and saw a young bull but he ran away so I guess we didn't have to be afraid of him. We turned around and came back to the truck at that point anyway.


Gordon on the walking bridge in Patagonia Lake State Park.

Here's the pitch of the bridge.


View of Patagonia Lake from our picnic table.

A store in Tubac - if we still had the house I'm afraid I'd spend a lot of money here!

We did a quick trip through the Arizona side of Nogales. It was your typical border town. Here's one of the streets.

The drive up Hwy. 82 to Patagonia is a very scenic highway (photos below). When we left the State Park we continued north on Hwy 82 and the scenery was still beautiful. We then took Hwy 83 toward Tucson and turned of on a side road that took us just north of Green Valley so we could pick up I-19 again. On our way back we stopped at the San Xavier Mission at Tucson. This Mission is a working mission and has been under construction since 1989 and today the scaffolding was worse than usual. Maybe that means it will soon be done????



San Xavier Mission


I only took a couple of photos there, then came back to the truck and called my sister in Ottawa. It's still cold there but I was told the ice is melting on their driveway! Sure glad I'm here!