Tombstone

We headed out early this morning for Tombstone Arizona, it was about a two hour drive.

The store fronts and boardwalk looked pretty authentic and there are lots of actors in period costumes giving advice and kidding around with the tourists.

If you timed and framed your pictures right it looked pretty darn real.

We took the tour of the Tombstone Courthouse, because Barry and Mona volunteer at the arboretum we got in free.

Barry said this tandem bike on display in the courthouse was the only one he had ever seen where both sets of handlebars could steer the bike.

We had buffalo burgers for lunch at the Crystal Palace.  It was the first time I have had it and I really like the way it was cooked and tasted!

From there we went to the Pima Air Museum in Tucson.   On the way to Tombstone I had seen this VW buried along the road, so Barry stopped on the way back so I could take a picture.

I wanted some more pictures of the USAF Thunderbirds F-4E Phantom they have on display.

It was around 85, so we mainly went to the indoor displays until right at the end.

Then I wanted some pictures of a couple of F-4s on outside display.

We also drove by this airfield where they are tearing apart old jets, there are quite a number of 747s there.

This evening when we were sitting outside Barry noticed a little cotton tail rabbit in the yard.  There ended up being 3 or 4 of them out there and I got several good pictures.

Skydiving and Sunsets

I don't hear the smaller birds with high pitched calls, but I can hear the doves great!  This one was up on the roof all morning doing lots of cooing and I could hear it fine.

This is at 8:00 AM and it was already a beautiful day.

Bentley was out enjoying the sunshine,

 while Barry was repairing the drip line.

Barry took me to Skydive Arizona today, what a great place!  They have tables and chairs set up right next to the landing area so you can see all the action!

Every load of jumpers the plane took up seemed to have at least one tandem jump take place.

This lady didn't look like she enjoyed her tandem jump too much, she stood out there like that for about 5 minutes before she could walk off the field.

This couple in their 70s made several solo jumps with a group that was all made up of older people.  I knew they were older when he fell down on landing and got up pretty much like I would!

There was an all girl group that was jumping together, they were the only ones to jog off the field so they could get their chutes packed sooner for the next jump.

From there we went to the wind tunnel skydiving facility at the same location.  After watching a mother and daughter in it, some of the skydivers from the other field came practiced their routines in it.  I will post a link to some video I shot of that in a few days.

We went to Robson Ranch for lunch, I had fish and chips which were excellent!  Barry had their meat loaf which was served over mashed potatoes and Texas toast, then covered with gravy.

This evening Mona's friend Carolyn came over for dinner.  We sat out on the patio to eat and it was still in the 70s and very pleasant.
 The sun was going down while we ate and I got a bunch of nice pictures.

Another beautiful Sunset

Barry was out spraying weeds this morning.

Mona has lots of bird feeders out, so I had lots of birds to take pictures of, most of which I didn't have a clue about what they were.

Mona redid this area this year, making the dry creek bed deeper.

I took a little walk around the area this morning.  This is a view of the back fence from the other end of the block.

Barry is digging up a drip water line to find the leak.  Amazing how much water came out of a 1/4 inch line in an hour.

This is another bird that I don't know the name of.  Barry and I went to Safeway for a few things they needed, on the way home we stopped to get me another pair of cargo shorts, I only brought one pair along and with the weather being in the 80's I could see I wasn't going to be wearing jeans.

This afternoon, we went over to Mona's friend Carolyn's place.  Carolyn is a master gardener, this is one of the orchids in her greenhouse and  it was instantly my favorite.

Mona showed me around Carolyn's back yard.

Because they have a pool, Carolyn has done the back yard in a tropical style.  This evening there was another nice sunset and Barry took me down by the fire station where there were some Saguaro cactus in the foreground.

Copper Mine

After leaving the Biosphere, Barry took me to the Ray open pit copper mine.  It is currently one and a half miles wide and two and a half miles long and about 2200 feet deep.  If you click on the picture and make it bigger, you will see a little to the right of center a shovel loading a dump truck.

This is how it looks after I zoomed up on them.  The shovel is powered by 7200 volts and it will fill the truck with five buckets full.  The dump truck will carry 400 tons, it is powered by a 3650 horsepower V-16 engine powering two electric motors in the rear axle.  It will go 40 miles per hours, but when loaded coming up out of the mine it looked like it might be doing 10 or 15 miles per hours.  Each one of these trucks costs 3.5 million dollars and they are operating five of them.

This is a Cat D11R that they use in the mine where they are dumping.

The D11R Cat looks small along side of the 400 ton dump truck, it is about as tall as the back tires on the truck.

In another area of the mine were drilling rigs that bore holes for explosives to break the ore free.  In the back ground there is a 400 ton truck parked between two small 240 ton trucks.

The piles of tailings from the mine are everywhere and stretch for miles.

I took lots of scenery pictures for Vera on our way home.

We stopped in Superior on the way home and had lunch at Porters, they have great hamburgers!

Mona did a lot of trimming in the yard while we were gone, Barry is relaxing after our big day.

There was a nice sunset to finish off the great day.

Biosphere 2

Mona's sister Vera and Frank left this morning.  After they left, Barry and I headed to the Biosphere 2.

This my first good look at the Biosphere as we went down the access road to it.

The University of Arizona runs the facility now and they have added buildings to create a campus.

This is the entrance to the biosphere, there is an airlock located there that everything had to go through.

The tour guide we had was great, he had been on the project since the start and gave us lots of insights to what happened.  This is the third time Barry has been on the tour and he learned a lot from this guide.

The Tropical Rain Forest was really something to see!  Barry commented that you almost expected Tarzan to come swinging by on the vines.

The tour was a mile long, up and down stairs, it covered lots of different areas.  This is the beach of their ocean, there is a wave generator at the other end.

After the ocean talk, we went down these stairs to the desert area.  There was a marsh area, but the guide told us it got away from them and became overgrown.

The basement was next, all the heating and cooling equipment was located there.  It costs about a half a million dollars a year to heat and cool the Biosphere.

From the basement, we went down a tunnel to the South Lung.

There are two lungs, they use a large weight on top of a diaphragm to keep the air pressure in the Biosphere constant when the air temperature changes.  We had to go out through that door in the wall and you wanted to hold onto your hat because there was lots of air blowing out of the chamber.

Then we had to go up this flight of steps to get back to the Biosphere.  I made it without any trouble and felt pretty good about that because it has been a while since I have walked.

At the top was the end of the guided tour, then we were free to go where we wanted.  I wanted Barry in this picture so you could get an idea of how big this place is.

This is part of a crew member's apartment, there was a spiral staircase going up to what we figured was a bedroom.









This is the crew's dining and kitchen areas.

Most of the Biosphere was built using this type of bolt together structure.  It was a very interesting tour and I really enjoyed it!