7am Jonathan was up and had the kettle on for tea, coffee and cocoas. It was a beautiful crisp and sunny morning in the Sonoran Desert! So cool to wake up in such beauty after driving into the campground at dusk. I cooked an eggs/"sausage"/spinach breakfast for everyone and we hung out for awhile and just enjoyed our surroundings.
Our campsite, with ocotillo and saguaro cactus, and mesquite trees. The view out our "dining room window" in the morning.
Cocoas and coffees in the sunshine! Ollie took a liking to learning about Papa's camera that has a macro zoom! He took lots of neat photos on Papa's camera. Amelia did lots of painting.
Around 10:45am we departed for the quick drive down the winding road to the Sonoran Desert Museum. It was highly recommended to us by a couple of people we met. We thought we might spend a couple of hours looking around, but it was WAY bigger than we anticipated. It was an indoor/outdoor museum kind of like the Vancouver Aquarium back home. Trails to explore that had enclosures with desert animals with informative signs, along with many walks that showed off the local area plants and insects. This place was awesome! The kids liked it but also didn't have as much energy needed to make it carefree, haha. We spent from 11am to 4:30pm in the "museum"... (which we renamed "centre" when talking with the kids about it because they were put off by anything named a "museum" when we were in Ottawa).
Cool snakes! Amelia loved the snakes. Ollie took lots of close ups with his little digital camera.
Ollie with BAT ears down in the caves.
Javelinas!! Jonathan got to see these guys in the wild in Big Bend.
This little kangaroo rat was the cutest... tucked up sleeping in his underground burrow.
We heard that they had sting-ray feeding in the far area of the "museum" and we got there in time for the sting ray viewing and feeding, so I paid for me and the kids to go in and check it out while Mum, Dad and Jonathan hung out in the shade. I bought two lots of stingray food (raw shrimp and a little fish) for the kids to fee the stingrays. After the demonstration of how to properly present the food to them, the kids nailed it and had a blast feeding the little rascals. They were like cartoons! kept flapping along the edge and showing their funny little faces. We were kind of annoyed at the people who CLEARLY didn't follow the feeding rules. Even adults waving and flapping the food around and shrieking! oh man. Anyhow, Ollie and Meems did a fantastic job and loved the weird feeling of the rays slurping the food from their hands.
On the walk out towards the exit, we let the kids have a short play inside the "PackRat Playhouse" which had cool climbing equipment inside and big rope courses and tube slides. It wasn't very busy since it was the end of the day. Jonathan stayed inside with the kids while Mum and Dad walked further up the path to a sheltered area to hang out and wait. Kids had fun climbing around (suddenly had energy? ha) and playing, but we needed to get moving as by now we'd be arriving in Organ Pipe National Park in the dark - not ideal. (side note: the playhouse would be the last place we had Ollie's suede outback hat).
By 4:30pm we were on the road again heading for Organ Pipe National Park (west and south) to the Twin Peaks Campground via Hwy 86w - a 2 hour drive. By 5pm we drove through another Border Patrol check station (just had to slow down). Saw lots of trucks, and also a border patrol helicopter flying around. We were getting very close to the Mexican-USA border.
As beautiful as the sunset was, it was getting dark fast and we were in need of diesel. We were banking on reaching a gas station on the Tohono O'odham Nation Reserve along Hwy 86. Unfortunately when we drove by it, the Shell appeared closed, so we kept driving with our fingers crossed that we'd make it to the Marathon Station near Why, AZ.
By 6:20pm we stopped at the Marathon Gas station on the reserve near Why. They were open 24hrs and were surprised the other Shell station was closed. With 124,081km on the odometer, we filled the tank up (thanks to Gma & Papa for covering the cost of the fill-up!) and were back on the dark, dark road to Organ Pipe -- and by 7pm we were now headed on the Hwy 85 South. This Highway as soooo dark with no shoulder, and expanse of prickly desert on either side of it. It was a harrowing drive for another 40minutes, just hoping that some random desert animal didn't leap out in front of the RV. Yikes. There were no other vehicles on the road.
at 7:25pm, in the dark, we arrived at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and pulled into the Twin Peaks campground. We had booked ahead, thank goodness, and for $20 we had a lovely site to pull into at the end of a long day and long, white-knuckled drive. Jonathan was fantastic and got us there safely.
We had a quick pasta dinner and tucked into bed. Gma and Papa spent another night in the rig with us, cozied up on the back bed. Jonathan read a bit from the "Death in Big Bend" book he bought. This place looked like it would be pretty cool to wake up to in the morning and Jonathan was going to set an alarm for a sunrise walk for anyone interested. :)
* check out the height of that Saguaro cactus beside our 11.5ft rig!!
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