Tucson Day 1

It was snowing when we left Utah!

We had some Covid airline tickets that we needed to use before they expired. We'd planned a trip to Arizona and had to cancel, so we used our ticket credit to head to Arizona when things opened up. We knew it would be a short trip, but we really wanted to see the cactuses at Saguaro National Park. 

Look at that view from the airplane!

Our flight left on Thursday around noon, and even though we gained an hour on the time change, we lost one while waiting in line for our rental car. We finally got a small sedan and headed north to visit the Phoenix Temple. It was a really short stop. We walked quickly around the temple and took some photos for our books.

The Phoenix temple was beautiful.

Then we climbed back in the car to make the hour drive to our next stop. We arrived at the Mesa Temple and found that it was having its rededication. The grounds were shut down as they had dignitaries visiting in preparation for the Open House to start on Saturday. A friendly usher allowed us to sneak inside the gate and take a few quick pictures, even though there was a small stage in the foreground. We spent even less time at the Mesa Temple, and we didn't get to walk the grounds at all.

Someone was nice enough to take our photo by the Mesa temple.

It was only a half hour to our third and final stop, the Gilbert Temple. It was almost dark, so our photos have a beautiful dusky quality. The temple was closed, so we didn't walk these grounds, either, but we did have some window washers in our photos. We only stayed for a minute and then hustled across the street to Wendy's for dinner. We still had two hours to get to our house in Tucson. 

We always try to include the temples in our vacations.

We didn't take a lot of photos on the drive, but we did enjoy seeing cactuses, desert flowers, and palm trees. It was eight o'clock by the time we arrived and got the baseball game turned on. The stars were really beautiful, and the air was clear, which we haven't seen for months due to the California wildfires. Even though we didn't see much today, it was fun to be here and fill out our temple books.

Seth fell asleep watching the World Series.