We moved on to Tucson area and are staying at a county campground about 9 miles out of town in the middle of a cactus forest. there are thousands of Saguaro's around here along with many other styles of cactus. we are about 2 miles from Saguaro National park West.
We visited the national park visitor center and went for a short hike at one of the hiking trails nearby. the Desert is very interesting in this area as the plant life is very diversified and is very thick on this part of the desert compared to western Arizona.
They get about 11 or 12 inches of moisture here each year so it is enough to keep it green this time of year.
 we also visited the Pima County air museum, there are 80 acres of aircraft stored there and if you wanted to take the bus tour they take you over to what they call the boneyard, with thousands of aircraft being stored on hundreds of acres. we opted to save that for next time we are down here and just visited the main museum.
I dont have room for all the photos I took of all the aircraft but I posted some of the most interesting.

SR71 Blackbird aircraft.

B-52 bomber

C130 transport plane, I rode in a few of these in Vietnam.

B-52

This is one of only 2 B-52's that carried the X-15 rockets up to high altitudes so that they could be dropped and go up into space. The marks on the side of the plane are painted versions of the X-15 and there were 135 on this plane, I am assuming that means it carried the X-15 135 times.

President Kennedy and Johnson's first jet. there was also a prop plane  there called Freedom One that was used by President Kennedy.

B-17

this flag was the first flag carried on to Utah Beach at Normandy during WW2

Huey Helicopter

Russian fighter plane, they also had some Mig's from the 50's on up.

A V rocket from Nazi Germany. this one was captured before it was fired at England.

Our campsite in the desert. we have electric at the site and water nearby so we are spoiled after dry camping for the last month.

the spines of the Saguaro

Here is a Great Horned Owl at the Desert Museum. they have it trained to swoop from tree to tree and  land on the handlers gloved hand. it was a great performance.

This was a Red tail hawk. I was trying to capture the image as it swooped by but had a hard time following it with the camera because it was so fast. I was using a telephoto lens. but the bird was only about 30 to 40 ft away. They would swoop just over the heads of the people and sometimes their feathers would touch their head or caps.

this is a Diamond back  Rattlesnake, it was very active as were several other of the snakes in their cages.

A tarantula!

There were lots of very active humming birds in the hummingbird display.

Here is a F-4 Phantom Jet used in the 60's in Vietnam.

a Japanese Zero.

I got some of the pics mixed up from the airplanes to the birds. I cant figure out this blogging sometimes!!