Scorched in Tucson

Walking in Tucson, Arizona is like walking in an oven. The daily temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees Celsius, just over 100 Fahrenheit. Unlike most places, the breeze only makes this worse: the wind burns, not cools, and whips you with stray grains of sand. This is because Tucson is a city in the desert (the Sonoran desert to be exact), in one of the hottest areas in the USA.

Woo, cacti!

The city is organized roughly in a grid formation, with the downtown central business district being on the west side of town. Outside this, the city spreads out to the east, north and south with block after block of spaced out malling. It just so happened that on our first day there we spent most of the afternoon in such a strip mall, buying a new camera after our other one sadly died a death at the San Antonio Riverwalk. RIP, Old Faithful.

Being as it was very hot, we didn't spend much of our time walking around outside. Balmy air-conditioned interiors were far more appealing. That said, we did dedicate a day to roaming around the downtown historic district. Having seen the rather impressive county courthouse, and taken photos with the giant cacti that surrounded it; we checked out some old-style homes. Unfortunately, that was pretty much all there was to the historic district. The silver lining on this was that we could escape and lounge in the coolness of the hotel pool without a guilty conscience.

Tucson Courthouse, located in the Historic District

Old Town

A very friendly cactus

We also spent the 4th of July there, and had a fantastic time! We managed to get tickets to a local baseball game, with supplementary fireworks, thus killing two birds with one stone: celebrating the 4th in a suitably all-American manner, and introducing Dex to the American past-time. Boy, did it live up to expectations. The ball game was suitably long-winded, the crowd was suitably large (in more ways than one), and the patriotic sing-along at the end was suitably cringing. If any of you were wondering, unfortunately the Tucson Padres lost. There's nothing quite like sitting with a numb bottom in the bleachers, clutching a bucket-sized soda (a 'regular', of course) and watching the local pros hitting home runs into the cheering crowd. By the end of our stay we felt like we'd witnessed some genuine Americana, the sort of stuff more touristy places lack.

Dex VERY excited to be at his 1st baseball game.. it wore off by the 6th inning

GO PADRES!!!!!!!!

No 4th of July b-ball game is complete without fireworks