Desert Gardens and Saguaro National Park

I seem to be falling behind on the blog.  I wanted to post at least once per week.  We've stayed here at the Davis-Monthan  Air force Base FamCamp for two weeks.  We've been pleased with the campground.  It's  picturesque, well maintained, and reasonably priced.  The camp is thinning out now with a lot of snowbirds heading for home.  Our neighbors tell us that in January and February the campground is very popular.  At that time all of the 250+ full hook-up sites were occupied with dozens more rigs on a waiting list in the no hook-up overflow sites.  Many snowbirds spend the entire winter season here.  We will definitely be back to the Tucson area in future winters.  The city is just outside the base gate and is large enough to offer all manner of shopping from big box stores to higher-end mall fare.  The favor-ability of the park itself is rivaled only by the park at May Port Naval base in Jacksonville, Florida.

During the past two weeks we visited both the eastern and western parts of Saguaro National Park. The classic western looking saguaro are very common all around Tucson.  We also traveled the scenic drive through the Coronado National Forest to the Mt. Lemmon summit to the north of Tucson.   Yesterday and today we enjoyed the base open house with flying exhibitions by the Thunderbirds and others.  These last two events I'll cover in a future blog.

The campground is nicely landscaped with desert plants.   Some of them are in bloom and most are remarkably beautiful for such a dry climate. 

All of the above plants are growing in the gardens around the campground.  The Saguaro National Park is located on both the east and west sides of Tucson.  We liked the western area which seems to be remarkable due to the larger number of these giant saguaro cacti.  The saguaro can be seen in suburban landscaping in communities all around Tucson.  We took many many pictures.  Ina got to use her new Nikon.  She took a goodly number of these pix.  Here are some of our best ones (also on Flickr.com).

 Finally, on the way back from Saguaro Park-West we found Ina's street.