Day Four - San Diego to Tucson

After waking early (0530 h), we packed the car, purchased fuel ($3.28 per Gallon) and headed towards Tucson, Arizona. However, it wasn't long before we came in to a rude shock. As we headed up the Cuyamaca Mountain Ranges to the East of San Diego, we encountered some heavy snow...yes, you heard me right, snow! To make matters worse, we passed six cars that had slid off the road and rolled over, one appeared to have rolled down a steep bank outside of our view on the other side of the road. Each of the accidents was being attended to with Police, and/or Ambulance and/or Fire Brigade. At one stage, we were actually following a Snow Plough. Here's some photos and a video taken by Schuyler:

Once we had passed a number of mountain ranges, we settled into a long drive across the flat desert land adjacent the Mexican border. We stopped for lunch at Yuma eating at Carl's Jr. Yuma is the half-way point between San Diego and Tucson and is home to a Marine Corps Air Station. The remainder of the drive was pretty uneventful, although Maureen actually had a stint of Highway driving for about 10 miles. 


The distance between San Diego and Tucson is 410 miles (660 km), which was quite long, but the 75 mph speed limit is certainly appreciated. Our rental tank was chewing fuel at around 18 miles per gallon.


We arrived in Tucson mid-afternoon and set about finding our Hotel, The Hampton Inn and Suites. It's quite nice and has a swimming pool, though the cool weather makes that a bit nugatory. After we settled in, Maureen decided that she wanted to arrange a mass lot of clothes washing and drying. Schuyler, Kyle and I headed to the small town of Sahuarita, about 30 miles out of Tucson (South) to visit the Titan Missile Museum. We did the tour and actually went right into the silo to see the Titan Missile up close. To give you an idea of the scale of this thing, it's about 15 stories tall, or freaking huge! We also got to visit the control room and I actually got to turn the key...you know, the one that would have been used to start World War 3. The tour was just fantastic.

On arrival back in Tucson, we headed out to a Sports Card shop (Schuyler has been researching), and all of the boys made a card purchase. Dinner tonight was at the Golden Corral, which is a very popular all-you-can-eat Restaurant Chain.


Distance from home is 12 809km.


Tomorrow is the Davis-Monthan Air Show.