about Tucson

Tucson is situated in Southern Arizona, 60 miles from Mexico and 425 miles from San Diego on the Southern Californian coast. Tucson lies in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, which takes in Phoenix 100 miles to the North and parts of Northern Mexico. This is the only desert where the giant Saguaro cactus grows, as well as barrel cactus, ocotillo and cholla which are all seen in abundance throughout the city; as well as a huge variety of trees many which are not native to this area. It’s population of 1 million is about the same as the population of Devon, held within an area no more than 20 miles in diameter.

“Tucson, too SAHN or TOO sahn, is one of the oldest towns in the United States. Tucson was originally an Indian village called Stook-zone, meaning water at the foot of Black Mountain. Hugo O'Conor established the Tucson Presidio in 1775. August 20th, 1775 is considered Tucson's birthday. Spanish settlers arrived in the area in 1776. Tucson officially became part of the United States with the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Tucson served as capital of the Arizona Territory from 1867 to 1877”. (taken from City of Tucson’s website at www.tucsonaz.gov)

Tucson's rich cultural heritage centres around a unique blend of Native American, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American influences. In terms of population figures, there are approximately 2/3rds Whites to the a third of Hispanic/Latinos (plus other races).

There is a lot of Spanish spoken in the City and a lot of signs and public information are bilingual, written in English and Spanish. South Tucson is really an Hispanic area where Spanish is spoken and the vast majority of the stores and business are Hispanic – good for Mexican food.

The City is laid out on a grid system, like most modern US cities, with major road intersections every mile. Roads go North - South or East – West and navigation is often via the mountain range seen ahead of you. The Tucson Mountains are in the West (similar height to Snowdon) Santa Rita range in the South, 9.453 feet and home of the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, the Rincons are in the East and the Santa Catalina mountains in the North where the top of Mount Lemon 9157 feet is 1 hours drive from the city. Tucson itself has a height of 2,300 feet.

The major roads have 2, (sometimes 3) lanes in each direction, many have underused bicycle lanes. The urban population lives in between these major roads in ranch houses, like our bungalows. The urban streets are very dark at night due to the cities black sky’s policy to aid observation of the heavens.

Welcome to Tucson friends

Welcome to our Tucson friends who we have just invited to view our blog.

At first we thought that we wouldn't invite and engage our Tucsonan friends as the blog would be more interesting to our Brit chums.
We are writing this for primarily our British friends but figured - what the heck - Tucsonans will love it too. They can see how we see things, from our perspective, and also will give a chance for some interaction between the two groups, if so desired.

Getting Around

Everyone is thanking us here for bringing the British weather with us. Tucsonians love the rain. My students used to beg me to let them out of class when it rained just so they could stand in it. But they’re also very fearful; some are brave enough to watch it from the safety of the front porches of their ‘ranch’ houses. Some take a big gulp and chance driving taking extra care breaking, cornering and negotiating puddles. It soon dries though and today like 2 days ago is again sunny; a piercing, high contrast sunshine which removes any subtlety and saturation from the colour spectrum.

We’ve borrowed a couple of bikes from our friends Dave and Angela. They’re so generous, Dave builds custom made bicycles for a living www.bohemianbicycles.com and Angela teaches business classes via the internet. They ride tandem so Sadie has Angela’s 24 speed mountain bike (although she only uses 4 of them) and I have a cool bike that looks like a child’s toy with a 7 speed hub gear, like the old Sturmey Archer 3 speed hubs of my youth; so I feel like an 11 year old. Tucson is full of cycle routes, cycle lanes and cycle paths but not cyclists. The few that there are keep to the downtown and university area and to the foothills of the mountains on the edge of town. Serious cyclists take the 26 mile trek to the top of Mount Lemon, a gain of 6,000 feet. Not so serious ones build their own bikes out of trash like Brian who we met cycling up Pima today (see pic from behind); his bike was twice as high as the usual and painted bright orange to hide the wealth of welding.

We cycled the 5 miles to downtown this morning, in the sunshine, and here we are just off 4th Avenue outside the Army Surplus Store.

Arrival

Here we are at our house, finishing off the Marie Callender Lemon Meringue Pie (mmmm, and oh dear its 'pie month' in February and all pies are 'half off') and writing our first blog. We've just had some heavy rainfall for an hour or so - bet that makes you feel better - but now its stopped and is brightening up a bit.

We arrived in Tucson, finally, at midnight Tucson time on Wednesday January 23rd. That's 7am UK time and makes it a 24 hour journey from getting up at our hotel in Gatwick to touching down in the desert. We were very relieved to be there, even though we waited for our bags for a while and they didn't come through. We had to have them delivered the next day to our friends Dan and Barb's house - Dan met us at the airport. We had to phone a pager through to Tucson airport from Houston, Texas, to tell him we were not going to make our connection - he got the pager but was waiting for us in another part of the airport.

To start from the top to tell the saga of our journey - it got off to an ominous start as we missed the bus from Bideford to Barnstaple to catch the train to Exeter, the first leg of the journey. We did catch the next bus though and still had time to get to the station to go on the 'nodding donkey'. Exeter was fine and we changed trains at Reading. There are weird platform numbers there - our train was on platform 4a, so we went to 4 and waited. The allotted departure time came and went and so did our train without us on it! Then we discovered that platfrom 4a was in fact a completely different platform. So we waited for the next train to Redhill, which is near Gatwick and got on it and made ourselves comfortable. Only to hear an announcement that the train had broken down and everyone had to get off and go to Platform 10 instead. We finally left, an hour later than we hoped and got a connecting train to Gatwick. We didn't have to wait too long for the courtesy bus to our hotel - we got checked in by 9 and managed to breathe a sigh of relief and get some food.

The biggest problem in the flight was George W, Bush - the Intercontinental airport at Houston, we got delayed landing because of the kind of rain we get in England. Then immigration left us 'in-line' for an hour & half because it's difficult scanning eyes and fingerprints when your computer system crashes. So we lost our connection and got transferred to a later plane, which itself got delayed by an hour. Everything else was good, as flights go, read, worked, watched 'House' on the TV screen and got 1 hour of sleep.