Old Pueblo

Today Mister C, Master J & myself headed down to Tucson for the day. Mainly, we went to see San Xavier del Bac. This church, built in the late 1700s, is pretty well know and pretty well photographed. Even though I've lived less than three hours from it for most of the past 10 years, I've never visited it. Currently it's in the middle of a huge restoration. Which means that for the past five years there has been scaffolding surrounding the one side of the church. That was taken down about two weeks ago. The scaffolding is going back up on the other side in early March. Which meant there was only a finite amount of time available to take scaffolding free photos of this gorgeous old church. We wanted to go two weeks ago, but Master J was sick. Last weekend was out because it was Valentines day and we figured it would be swamped. So we went today. It was more gorgeous than I can even describe, the details in the architecture are amazing. The tourists are annoying (I don't count as I actually live around here) and the fact that there was a christening going on inside when we first arrived was kind of a bummer. But overall, gorgeous, well worth the drive and the pictures don't do it justice.

After we left San Xavier del Bac, we went to the Tucson Botanical Garden. This would have been worth the trip alone. It's not huge, maybe only five acres, but it is well laid out and just full of all sorts of plants and landscapes. They have a butterfly house that we went through that had tons of beautiful butterflies flying around. It's fairly hard to get decent pictures with them moving around and all the people jostling around but I got a few. Once we left there, we wandered down paths checking out all the different styles of gardens. It was interesting to me how peaceful Master J was the whole time we were there. He liked the zen garden and the worm bin especially well. Overall, it was a fantastic day and we decided on the way home that we need to do more of these day trips.

San Xavier del Bac - just ignore the aimless tourists and look at the cool building.


A shot of the side that has been restored (I liked the way it looked at this angle, not really sure why)


At the butterfly garden


Another one


An iris from the memorial garden, some sort of succulent (I think) and flowers on a cactus - I'm so informative, no?




Master J