Monday, March 27, 2006
This is Arizona calling...
Hello from sunny Tucson, Arizona!
We're down here on a wee break which we tacked on to the end of a brief visit to San Diego, where I was giving a talk at the Society of Surgical Oncogy last weekend. San Diego was lovely and warm, and is right on the Pacific coast - it was good to be beside the sea again. The hotel was excellent, with a big pool and a hot-tub, and the local restaurants were great too (we ate in a different place every night - fish, Italian, Thai and Persian respectively!)
We hired a car at San Diego airport and then headed east over the mountains up into the interior of California, before descending into the deserts and crossing over the border into Arizona. The navigation was made a lot easier by the fact that the car comes with a built-in GPS unit which seems to be accurate to within a few feet and tells you exactly when and where to turn!
We spent last night in a dusty border town called Yuma, which is right on the Mexican border and is where the Colorado river comes down and leaves the US. We spent today driving east again, 240 miles through the Sonoran Desert which is full of cactuses (cacti?) and tumbleweeds. We were even attacked by a tumbleweed on the highway! We also saw a tyre blow out on an RV on the highway and the hard shoulders are littered with fragments of tyres from previous blow-outs! The temperatures were up to 85F, which is about 27C, in the desert.
We are now sitting in our suite in a small hotel on the northern outskirts of Tucson (Windmill Suites)- we have a view overlooking the courtyard, the pool and the hot-tub. It's still pretty warm here - 25C at the moment, at 5pm. We are planning to use Tucson as a base for daytrips over the rest of the week - places like Tombstone, the Sonoran Desert Park, Bisbee and maybe a wee trip to the Mexican border, before heading north to Phoenix at the weekend. We'll try to make a brief blog entry most days to let you know what we are up to and include pictures too!
Love
J & P
We're down here on a wee break which we tacked on to the end of a brief visit to San Diego, where I was giving a talk at the Society of Surgical Oncogy last weekend. San Diego was lovely and warm, and is right on the Pacific coast - it was good to be beside the sea again. The hotel was excellent, with a big pool and a hot-tub, and the local restaurants were great too (we ate in a different place every night - fish, Italian, Thai and Persian respectively!)
We hired a car at San Diego airport and then headed east over the mountains up into the interior of California, before descending into the deserts and crossing over the border into Arizona. The navigation was made a lot easier by the fact that the car comes with a built-in GPS unit which seems to be accurate to within a few feet and tells you exactly when and where to turn!
We spent last night in a dusty border town called Yuma, which is right on the Mexican border and is where the Colorado river comes down and leaves the US. We spent today driving east again, 240 miles through the Sonoran Desert which is full of cactuses (cacti?) and tumbleweeds. We were even attacked by a tumbleweed on the highway! We also saw a tyre blow out on an RV on the highway and the hard shoulders are littered with fragments of tyres from previous blow-outs! The temperatures were up to 85F, which is about 27C, in the desert.
We are now sitting in our suite in a small hotel on the northern outskirts of Tucson (Windmill Suites)- we have a view overlooking the courtyard, the pool and the hot-tub. It's still pretty warm here - 25C at the moment, at 5pm. We are planning to use Tucson as a base for daytrips over the rest of the week - places like Tombstone, the Sonoran Desert Park, Bisbee and maybe a wee trip to the Mexican border, before heading north to Phoenix at the weekend. We'll try to make a brief blog entry most days to let you know what we are up to and include pictures too!
Love
J & P
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