We went to Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa today.
This display covers three floors high and has a flash flood every 20 minutes.
Lots of hands on displays, this actual bone says:
“Please Touch”.
Most of the pictures I took involved dinosaurs, however the museum covers time back to the beginning of the universe to current time with Arizona movies.
These displays show how fossils appear in nature.
Numerous large animals.
The last thing we did was pan for GOLD.
Great museum and we had a wonderful afternoon.
We are getting some heavy showers this evening.
This is a nice state park and we are in a new section of the park. I made the reservations a couple of weeks ago for two weeks. We were lucky to find a park which has sites open for two weeks, the weekends are usually full for reservation sites. We are in site 85.
Today we took the tour of Spaceport America the private spaceport being used by
Google Earth view of the main terminal.
This view is from 32,000 feet showing the 12,000 foot runway. An interesting google footnote is these pictures were taken on December 14, 2013. There are newer pictures of Truth or Consequences, NM which is only a few miles west of here from April 1, 2015. I’d have to say Branson has some influence on where Google takes pictures.
This is where we walked into the hanger and into the visitor’s center. The visitor’s center had some new high-tech displays and information about space and the spaceport.
This is looking through a window down into the hanger and a mockup of the passenger space craft.
This is the admin and runway tower building, also the fire department of spaceport and surrounding area.
This is the hanger doors side of the building.
Here you can see the track for the four hanger bay doors on this side, there are four more on the other side of the building.
Hanger and admin buildings.
This is a really long runway, 12,000 feet.
Cool sculpture at the entrance to the spaceport.
The stars on the inside of the curve.
I’m glad we went.
It was nice museum with a lot of information about the area.
From long ago.
And not so long ago.
Now remember this site has water, electric and covered picnic table for $14.00 a night and with our annual pass we get it for $4.00.
Here is the overhead view. We drove around a couple of times to get the site we wanted. The first site we stopped at was a nice site on the corner however a garbage dumpster was close to the site and to many people take their dog for a walk when they go to dumpster. Hank would have to let everyone know he was there to protect his campsite.
The Leasburg Dam is a diversion dam running most of the water into a canal.
This is what is left in the original river flow area looking up towards the dam.
This is looking down river and this is the largest flow area of the river bed.
My InReach GPS transmits it’s location to a satellite every 10 minutes when it’s moving and every 4 hours when it’s not moving.
It has an internal record of where it is every minute and when I sync the InReach over the internet you get a much smoother picture of our travels. If I was walking the blue line would pretty much be on the road.