Tucson Vacation

Janene and I get to go to an industry convention once every year. Last year we went to Florida. This year we visited Tucson, Arizona. We always stay at a very nice Marriott resort. Marriott's Starr Pass Resort is located in the Tucson mountains with this canyon view behind the resort.

Janene and I went for an early morning walk in this canyon and had the whole canyon to ourselves. It seemed that no hotel guests wanted to be out among the coyotes, rattlesnakes (18 different varieties) and cacti. There were tons of saguaro cacti all over the place each one, just a little different from the next. We saw cactus wrens with their nests inside the cactus. Janene stared down a coyote for a while.

We took an afternoon break from the conference sessions to visit the San Xavier del Bac Mission. This mission was begun in the 1600's with this building being completed (not the right word since the east tower was never finished) decades before the Declaration of Independence was written. We have a tendency to forget that the Catholic Church founded missions all over the southwest when Mexico was part of the Spanish colonial empire long before the earliest settlements in Plymouth and Jamestown.

The interior of this mission was incredibly ornate in the baroque fashion, all hand crafted with crude hand tools at the farthest reaches of the Spanish civilization. The cement and plaster was made with a kind of glue made by boiling down cactus and squeezing out the juice as an additive that has held the cement together for the last 300+ years. We were there at the same time an Indian family was celebrating a wedding. All the bridesmaids we dressed in brightly colored homemade dresses and the altar boys were dressed in brilliant white clothing. This building is a brilliant beacon on a dusty desert plain.