Bicycling Tucson

Today is our last day in Tucson, and we saved for it a long bicycle ride around town, to have lunch at a great beer bar, explore the University of Arizona campus, view some exhibits at the Arizona State Museum, and stop by a local specialty coffee roastery to pick up some scrumptious coffee beans.

Tucson is a pretty bicycle-friendly city.  There are numerous bike trails in various parts of the city, and many, many designated bike routes with dedicated bicycle lanes, even on heavily traveled streets and roads.  While we couldn't always escape cycling in traffic, we rarely had to pedal in a lane of traffic. We felt pretty safe, therefore, and we noticed how considerate, generally, Tucson drivers were.  This is partly due to the prevalence of bicycle riders generally, but also due to the enormous numbers of students at University of Arizona who bicycle around town.

All in all, with the various destinations we explored such as Tucson Mountain State Park, the Saguaro National Park, some historic sites, and the laid back atmosphere and what appears to be reasonable cost of living, we would rate Tucson as a very attractive, liveable city.  We agreed we would put this on a short list, with Santa Fe NM, the Malibu-Ventura CA area, Temecula CA, Saint Helena CA, Kallispell MT, Lander WY, and St. Mary's GA, of places we would really like to re-visit.

The campus of the University of Arizona is a very attractive campus, especially for one located in an urban environment.  The photo below probably doesn't do it justice, but does convey the feeling of green-ness and spaciousness we felt as we bicycled around the university:

Our first destination was The Address at 1702, located right off-campus:

It serves an ever-changing selection of 46 imported beers and domestic micro-brews on draught and many more by the bottle.  There were many beers on their draught list that we didn't recognize.  We won't bore you with the full selection, but we picked the following:

Kathy found a Scotch Ale by Oak Creek called, "Knicker Kicker," and David picked a Widmer barley wine called, "Old Embalmer."  Since we both agreed on two other beers we both wanted to try - Black Diamond's "The Twelve," a Belgian Strong Dark ale, and The Address's "Gentle Persuasion," an Oatmeal Cream Stout with hints of maple and cinnamon - we asked for 5-oz. pours of each so as not to engage in any "drunk bicycling" (which Katie prohibits).  Here is a link to 1702's complete draught beer list.

We discovered EIGHT local Arizona craft beer breweries we hadn't heard about:

Local breweries

The Address (the bar we had lunch at)
Santan
Thunder Canyon
Nimbus
Lumberyard
Phoenix
1055
Borderlands
Oak Creek

I guess we'll have to bring our rig back through Arizona so we can stop at each of these breweries and get to know them better!

Our tummies happily filled with some beer and some great salad, we caught sight of Tucson's new light rail line, which is still only in testing, but will carry passengers soon in 2014:

We made our way across the University of Arizona campus to the Arizona State Museum:

There, we explored three fascinating exhibits.  The first was titled, "Curtis Reframed - the Arizona Portfolios." In the early decades of the 20th century, famed photographer of the American West Edward S. Curtis created and published a vast photographic record of North American Indians. The exhibit explores Curtis’s work with 13 Arizona tribes from 1903 to 1928. Here is one of his photogravure prints:

The second exhibit was titled, "Paths of Life:  American Indians of the Southwest."  It was a spectacular exhibit describing the origin myths, history and current life of TEN Native American tribes centered in the Arizona region.  The following photo shows the artwork devised for the exhibit, derived from petroglyphs of the various tribes:

The third exhibit is entitled, "The Pottery Project," and highlights 2,000 years of Native pottery-making traditions in the Southwest. The Arizona State Museum holds over 20,000 whole ceramic vessels, and is the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of indigenous pottery:

Having spent the afternoon in the museum, we pedaled our way back to the RV, but had to stop, on our way, at Arbuckles' Coffee Roastery, which was less than half a mile from our campground!  We decided to sample their flagship "Ariosa" coffee and their "European Espresso Roast" coffee.  These are whole beans, and we're really going to enjoy grinding them to slow brew in our Aeropress and Clever coffee contraptions!  We had a chance to chat with Denney Willis and his wife Pat, as well as their son Josh, who own and run the roastery.  We compared notes with them about the experiences we had visiting the Lima, Peru coffee roastery, Tostaduria Bisetti, run by our niece, Hannah Scranton, and her partner, David Torres Bisetti.

Aglow with our chance to share all things coffee with the Willises, we cycled home and set about enjoying our last sunset in Tucson:

Goodnight, Tucson.