Jan 12 & 13

Welcome to Arizona! After a safe flight in on the 11th, we were very excited to start our adventure in Tucson. We woke up bright and early and drove out to the Tucson Desert Museum. I don't think that I can emphasize enough how wonderful the weather is here. Just driving out to the desert was amazing in the fact that we could actually have the windows down! Anyway, the Desert Museum was really neat. I walked around with Adam, Joe and Caitlin and saw a wide variety of animals. On of the most interesting parts was the raptor show. The raven flew extremely close to our heads and I swore that it was going to hit me! My favorite bird that was featured in the show was the roadrunner. Although she is a predator, the roadrunner was very elegant and graceful. I was really upset, though, because we didn't get to see the tortoises. We were looking forward to them!
After a long day at the museum, we went over to the Arizona State Museum were we met up with a really interesting man named Patrick. He showed us a wide variety of pottery and explained a lot about the history of how different styles came into different areas. We even got to go behind the scenes and into their storage vault! It was really interesting.

01/13/09
Today was ALL about taking our pottery knowledge and applying it to real dig sites. We drove forever into the desert, tackling unpaved roads, uncivilized stretches of land, and long plumes of dust/sand coming off the car in front of us. Although we had a really long drive, our car had a great time singing and dancing. It definitely made the ride quicker! Patrick took us to some really interesting dig sites where we could actually pick up real shards of pottery. It's unfortunate that no one has categorized them and Patrick told us that many of the sites will go on to be like that for 10-15 years. He took us to some sites that required us to climb up hills and cliffs (definitely my favorite type!) and I felt like a little kid. I got called "monkey" for my climbing, ha ha. The day was really adventurous and exciting but very draining. On the way home, the front car got a flat tire and it was kinda funny to see so many physicists attempting to help fix a flat! I was kinda creeped out at some points along the drive because all I could think about was the movie "The Hills Have Eyes"... any one that has seen that movie will understand!