Unlike yesterday, when we hit places which Diane’s Dad and SO didn’t want to see again, we planned to spend today with them, touring Tucson before having dinner with Diane’s aunt to celebrate her 91st birthday. We’d bought Tucson Attractions Passports for them and us (and, in fact, had already more than paid for ours yesterday), so we wanted to visit places in the passport, and after a little discussion, settled on the Flandrau Science Center at the University of Arizona.

I should have looked them up on the Web first, because they were closed. Apparently, they’re working on building a new Science Center as part of a planned renovation of downtown, and so they are only open for a fraction of the schedule listed in the passport.

So we went with Plan B — art. We saw the Richard Avedon exhibit In the American West at the Center for Creative Photography, which I found somewhat disturbing; it seemed ironic that the best-dressed people in the photos were all described as “drifters”. Then we continued with the University of Arizona Museum of Art; I was fascinated by the Faithful Samurai woodblocks prints.

Dining today was not terribly inspiring; we had lunch at the Cactus Cafe at the UA Student Center, and dinner at Peking Palace. Dinner was by far the better meal. We also had breakfast at The Good Egg again.

On Monday, we visited Biosphere 2 and the Titan Missile Museum. Both were impressive in their own ways.

Biosphere 2 seemed (from the tour, at least) to be the idea of one man, Edward Bass, who poured an enormous amount of money into the project. There were obviously some political undercurrents (our guide told us about disputes with Columbia University, but the story was clearly only told from one side), and the future of the project is very much in doubt. At one point, it was to be sold, razed, and the land was to be used for a high-end housing development, but that seems to have fallen through. And so the complex is in maintenance mode for the forseeable future.

The Titan Missile Museum, on the other hand, expressed a national policy (Mutually Assured Destruction) whose time seems to have passed — at any rate, we no longer have an obvious opponent at which to point missiles. Every tour features a simulated missile launch — Jeff got to turn the key on our tour — and it was unsettling to see how short a time it took to launch the missile. It was also disturbing when our guide told us that the crew’s orders ended after launching the missile — after that, they would have been on their own.

In between our sightseeing, we hit some familiar Tucson restaurants — Magpie’s Pizza and El Charro Cafe. I didn’t think Magpie’s was as good as usual; El Charro, however, was in fine form. Breakfast, unsurprisingly, was at The Good Egg, which was as always.