by Jane St. Clair The Day of the Dead — or Dia de Muertos, as we call it in Tucson– comes after Halloween, but it’s even spookier. Every year hundreds of people gather downtown at night for the very very spooky All Souls Procession. Skeletons rise out of their graves– and they walk around, looking […]

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Everybody in Tombstone takes their LEGEND very very seriously. The actor who plays Doc Holliday quotes Shakespeare, while they play opera music during the reenactment. There are actually statues of all eight participants in their exact spots.This is serious stuff.

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In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk

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Arivaca has an interesting bar and café, La Gitano Cantina It’s a place where people have always a good time – even today, they have music and dancing. You’re supposed to be able to find bullet holes and bloodstains on the walls. Since the bartender not only used to serve drinks but also pull teeth with his pliers, the bloodstains may be from dental work. Who knows.

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Lake in Pinetop by Jane St. Clair I can’t think of anything as lovely as a late day afternoon by a lake. The way the long light slants and creates reflections. The way the color of shore flowers spill into the water in water colors. And then there’s how night is looming, approaching, and leaving […]

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Climbing up to Hole in the Rock Mountain is fairly easy. There are even man-made steps going up there, and it’s less than a third of a mile to the hole. Your award for climbing is a truly neat view of the city of Phoenix and its surrounding desert.

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Felicity, California has a real zip code and post office, but not very many people. It has maybe three people. The railroad tracks go right nearby, and there’s a strange pyramid. If you stand in the middle of the pyramid, you’re standing in the Center of the Earth. When attendants are around ( but not in 115 degree heat), you can get a certificate that says you stood in the Center of the Earth.

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As you walk around the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, you will love to take in the beautiful, panoramic overlooks of the desert. These alone are worth the price of admission. My favorite part of the museum is a trail that shows you how the land, plants and animals change as you go up a local mountain. At the bottom is the desert, but as you make your way up, you come across ponderosa, pine forest, and many other ecosystems.

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Percival Lowell Observatory by Jane St. Clair Percival Lowell had this pigheaded belief that intelligent creatures lived on Mars. Without his vision, we’d have lost a lot of great science fiction. What’s more, we wouldn’t have found Pluto. Percival Lowell was born into such a distinguished family that eventually they had a town named after […]

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The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has a Southern mansion from 1860 where Scarlett first encounters her Rhett. A Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A tenement building from the 1940s with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweet heart. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s. There are 500 of them,

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