Fair warning – Monday was another fun-filled tourist day with LOTS of pictures.  Our first destination was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

This time we got an early start and we took scenic Gates Pass to get to the desert museum.  This is the same route that we took with Tom and Marilyn Anteau when we made our return trip from Old Tucson last Saturday.  Old Tucson is just around the corner (metaphorically speaking) from the Desert Museum.

We stopped briefly at the top of the pass to enjoy the views:

Here’s the sign on the main road (N Kinney Rd) directing us to the Museum.

The Desert Museum entrance.

I just had to take a photo of this “rolling billboard” for the Desert Museum that was parked out front.  A 1960 Studebaker Lark Station Wagon, I believe.

Once again we were able to use the coupon book we purchased at the FamCamp office for $15.  This coupon book has really paid for itself… our half-price entrance fee was a whopping $15.50 for the two of us.

As you can see from the brochure below… no pets allowed 🙁  But, we knew that before we came here…  poor little dog “Coach” had to stay at home in the Coach again.  At least he has air-conditioning; whereas we don’t.

This was our tour-guide for the day; a fold-out map of the museum attractions.  If you click on the picture of the map (below) to enlarge it, you can see the many trails and loops we walked.

According to Wikipedia: “The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is a 98-acre (40 ha) zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, natural history museum, publisher, and art gallery founded in 1952.”  (Click HERE to learn more from wikipedia, or HERE for the museum website).

Now follow along on our tour – I’ll keep the narration to a minimum this time:

So what do you think?  Is this a cool place or what?

Now how about a tour through the gift shop:

Now that was like a gift shop on steroids, wasn’t it?

Adjacent to the gift shop and museum exit is one more aquarium display:

Book your trip now… you gotta see this place!

I even collected all the animal footprint stamps that are located throughout the park.  Most of the kids that visit, get a cool booklet to put their ink stamps in, but I made do with the back-side of our tour-guide map.   It gave me something to do other than take pictures… guess that didn’t work out so well, eh?

After our awesome, but somewhat hot, tour of the Desert Museum, we decided that we still had enough time left in the day to check out a big white church that we heard and read about.  We saw the church along-side of Interstate 19 yesterday when we visited the Titan Museum.  A neighbor at the campground told us it’s a “must-see” attraction and it’s only about 19 miles away from the Desert Museum.  So we plugged it into the GPS and off we went.

However, since this post is large enough already; I’ll make a new one… Here’s a “teaser” picture of San Xavier del Bac Mission Church:

Check back for part II of today’s adventure…