*flop*

zoonut and I got into Oxford last night at about 9 PM. The Great Western (And Then Eastern) Adventure has been successfully completed!

It was definitely a whirlwind tour, especially on the trip home. We left L.A. the morning of the 17th, and drove to Phoenix, where we crashed with dev_chieftain. There was much mirth, and I had an awesome time, Dev. :) The next day we drove down to Tucson and explored the Sonoran Desert Museum, which is aptly misnamed. Sonoran Desert? Yes. Museum? Not so much. I picture Museums as full of man-made art, or animals long dead and stuffed for display. But this place was what you'd get if you fenced off parts of a landscape, put animals inside where they could enjoy their native habitat, and let people walk around the landscape.

I can't say how impressed I was with the place, from a design perspective. The people who put this together really had their heads on straight. For example, just inside the doors of the (AMAZING) walk-in aviary, there was a hanger with ringhooks on it. Attached to each ringhook was a laminated inventory sheet of the birds in the aviary, and a copy of a field guidebook to North American birds.

Another awesome thing about the "museum" is their philosophy toward visitors. They treat visitors like intelligent guests, and present everything -- graphics, their bird show, their docent presentations, all of which are very well written -- in an educational manner targeted toward people who might actually want to learn something about the animals, rather than giving dumbed-down presentations for particularly stupid childen. (Not that that happens everywhere; but it's a trend I see all too often in zoos.) Everything was all about being as up-front with the guests as possible about what's going on. There were signs on one section of flight cage that read something like, "We're not too happy about the size of this caging, but don't tell the birds - they're still doing fine. This exhibit will be replaced with a more spacious design soon."

So we spent... probably more time than we should have in Tucson. :) It was a long drive from there up to Roswell, New Mexico, where we failed to be abducted by aliens. We did, however, run into some nasty weather on the way out the next morning. Kudos to stationary_jew for texting us with a heads-up. It was icy rain from Roswell down to Carlsbad, where we toured the Big Room of the caverns. We didn't really want to come up again, as the weather was much nicer down below. But we hit the road again about noon, and drove to Dallas, where I got to see my buddies there.

And yesterday we headed home. This concludes our tour of the southeastern United States... ... except for all the places we still want to go. And the places we decided we need to go back when we have more time to hike in the Canyon and see the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk, and... ....

There will be pictures. Hundreds of pictures. LJ's not going to accomodate them, so I'm thinking of springing for some server space.