7-15-17

8 hours of sleep appears to be what my body needs because at 6:00 I was awake.  The rest of the family was up by 7:30 and we were on the road around 8:30. A two hour drive put us in Organ Pipe Cactus. We explored the museum and watched the film but this is really a wilderness park on the border of Mexico. We overheard a law enforcement ranger talking with the park ranger about a border issue that happened the night before. We also saw a sign that addressed the importance of safety in the park and not to hike at night. I guess that's because you could be mistaken for someone crossing illegally. I was also struck by the sheer number of border patrol agents between the park and Tucson.  We must have passed 15-20 trucks, some with four wheelers or dirt bikes in the back to chase people down I assume. We passed one border crossing checkpoint about 50 miles from the park on the way in, checking cars that had come from the direction of Mexico and we passed another about 30 miles from the interstate on the east side of the Tohono O'odham Nation lands. Since we are using real maps, I found it very interesting to look at the border. Unless there is a major city at the border, it is generally owned by government entities (air combat fields, national parks, national recreation areas, etc) but I wondered how could our government patrol in Indian lands, and if we already own so much land and patrol so much of it, why do we need a wall? But I'll leave the politics alone for now. 

After driving across the desert, we arrived at the western part of Saguaro National Park. We spent about 3 hours exploring the exhibits, watching the park film, listening to a ranger talk on the giant cacti and hiking a short trail to see Hohokam petroglyphs on the rocks. It was only about 108 degrees today and we are in an area that receives more rain. Thunderstorms were building all around us as we hiked but they seem to move slowly here and more than an hour later we were in Tucson eating dinner and the rain had still not come. 

We checked in to our hotel and did a load of laundry while finishing the Twilight series of movies. About 9:00 we could hear thunder and see lightning and hear the rain but Lorelei and I said we weren't counting it as a real rain because we were not out in it. She and I haven't had a real rain storm since before June 10th. She misses it but even though I love water, I don't.