Tucson Vacation Day 4: Sunday, July 6
Sunday morning, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, our hosts left for the Bay Area in their nice red Prius. We packed up, and headed out to visit a Titan missile (sans its warhead). I was rather dubious about it, but in fact found it fascinating. When all the Titan missiles were decommissioned in 1982, this one was saved as a museum. Since everything was so well-built to begin with and has been meticulously maintained since, it is quite impressive as a Cold-War-era-technology time capsule. Donning helmets if we were 5'10" or taller, we were given a well-orchestrated tour of the facilities both aboveground and below.
Four-person teams, often headed by a female lieutenant, served 24-hour shifts, with their fingers literally hovering over the trigger. (I wanted to ask what happened if either of the two officers was unable to unlock their lock on the lockbox which contained the launch code.)
I’m not sure what this solution was for, or if its chemical structure has changed in the last 24 years.
Overall, the exhibit left me more impressed than I had expected by the technology and the seriousness with which it was deployed, which was surely the intent.
We wanted a nice meal before heading to the airport, and I wanted to get the kid a decent (non-shlocky) souvenir, so we set off for Tohono Chul Park, a botanical garden that I remember from my very first Tucson visit in 2000. As usual, we reached our destination more or less by dead reckoning; our attempt to get some sort of map from Google was foiled when it turned out that the crucial page had failed to print.
We ate outside in the tea garden, at tea time, no less. The food was good and the place deserted, though there must have been a brisk business earlier--a dove was quite uninterested in the scone crumb I tossed it. Afterwards, I got a cactus book and cactus bookmark for the kid (finding gift-shop books for kids who can read is actually quite difficult). We didn’t want to pay admission to the gardens when there was only a few minutes left, so we walked around the parking lot as a thunderstorm came up, taking pictures of cactuses
and clouds. And then we found a mailbox for our postcards deep in a huge mall, drove to Phoenix, got on the plane, and got safely back to the Bay Area.
Four-person teams, often headed by a female lieutenant, served 24-hour shifts, with their fingers literally hovering over the trigger. (I wanted to ask what happened if either of the two officers was unable to unlock their lock on the lockbox which contained the launch code.)
I’m not sure what this solution was for, or if its chemical structure has changed in the last 24 years.
Overall, the exhibit left me more impressed than I had expected by the technology and the seriousness with which it was deployed, which was surely the intent.
We wanted a nice meal before heading to the airport, and I wanted to get the kid a decent (non-shlocky) souvenir, so we set off for Tohono Chul Park, a botanical garden that I remember from my very first Tucson visit in 2000. As usual, we reached our destination more or less by dead reckoning; our attempt to get some sort of map from Google was foiled when it turned out that the crucial page had failed to print.
We ate outside in the tea garden, at tea time, no less. The food was good and the place deserted, though there must have been a brisk business earlier--a dove was quite uninterested in the scone crumb I tossed it. Afterwards, I got a cactus book and cactus bookmark for the kid (finding gift-shop books for kids who can read is actually quite difficult). We didn’t want to pay admission to the gardens when there was only a few minutes left, so we walked around the parking lot as a thunderstorm came up, taking pictures of cactuses
and clouds. And then we found a mailbox for our postcards deep in a huge mall, drove to Phoenix, got on the plane, and got safely back to the Bay Area.