Travel Adventures in Arizona and New Mexico, Part 4: Tucson

This is my fourth post about our adventures traveling through Arizona and New Mexico. I recommend reading the first, second, and third posts before this one. Because I blog about educational travel, I was given free passes, media rates, and other benefits for some of the places we visited throughout the trip. Other attractions we toured are free to everyone; we paid full price for the rest. What I paid has no bearing on my reviews. Everything that I share is something I whole-heartedly recommend.

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Tucson, Arizona 

We started Saturday, April 11 with a brief stop at San Xavier del Bac Mission. Established in 1692, San Xavier Mission is nicknamed 'The White Dove of the Desert.' It's an active church and there was a service going on, so we didn't take any interior photos. It's a beautiful place. 

If you know what this is, you can guess where we went next. 

It's a Titan II missile. (In)famous for carrying a 9 megaton nuclear warhead, it could strike targets over 6000 miles away in just 30 minutes. It was operational from 1963-1987. We learned all about it at the Titan Missile Museum. 

We started with the indoor exhibits before it was time for our guided underground tour. 

After an introductory video and safety instructions, our guide led us to this hatch. 

Um, watch for rattlesnakes?! Of all the places I would not expect to have to watch for rattlesnakes, it would be deep underground in a chamber designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. So I guess it's a good idea to put a sign there, or I never would have thought to watch. (Note: I watched carefully. There were no rattlesnakes.)

As we went down, down, down, we learned about all of the precautions in place to make sure only  authorized people were there when the Titan II was active. Authorized personnel had to make four phone calls to get passcodes along the way. Cameras, locks, and a really heavy door ensured no one else went in.  

This is the command center, where four people worked a 24-hour shift. 

Much of the space was a "No Lone Zone." The two-man (and in the later years, -woman) policy applied for the entire 24-hour shift, minus a 4-hour break that each person could take, away from this area. 

Our guide selected two kids from the tour group and we went through a simulated launch. There were a lot of fail-safes in place. Among them: The two control panels are far enough apart that (it was thought) no man could press the buttons on both at the same time. Our guide shared that he had a guest on a tour once who was well over 7 feet tall and COULD press both buttons at the same time. He significantly exceeded height limitations for the military at the time, so he wouldn't have been in the position to start a nuclear war on his own. 

Each person had their own padlock. Both had to agree to open the drawer that would reveal the codes... which then needed to be verified by each. There were a lot of clocks in the room: local time, military time (local), and military time (Greenwich Mean Time). 

  

Gear up like an astronaut to handle rocket fuel. 

We walked down a long hallway to see Titan II. It's over 100 feet tall.  

We returned topside where you could look down on Titan II from this launch pad. 

Here it is. Following the INF Treaty, the US requested permission to operate this site as a museum. There were two main conditions: 1) cut a hole in the nose cone so it's obvious the missile not carrying a nuclear warhead; and 2) keep the silo doors open so everything can be observed via satellite. 

There are a lot of other interesting exhibits outdoors surrounding the launch silo. I definitely recommend touring the Titan Missile Museum. 

We'd noticed something weird during our drive to the Titan Missile Museum. 

Kilometers? Road signs in the US are in miles, not kilometers. Yet... there it is. We learned that the 63-mile stretch of I-19 was part of a pilot program in 1978 to convert the American highways to the metric system. While the nationwide conversion failed, I-19 remained the only metric highway in the US. The speed limit signs are in miles per hour, but everything else is in kilometers. So interesting!

Our next stop was the Asarco Mineral Discovery Center, just up the road. Arizona is the nation's leading producer of copper. It's no surprise that one of Arizona's nicknames is the Copper State. We started with the indoor exhibits at the Discovery Center, where we learned all about the many uses of copper and how it is mined... 

  

... before moving to the outdoor displays, which focused on the equipment used at the mine. 

We watched for venomous critters but didn't see any. 

I'm titling the next three photos, "Steve and Cindy Pose With Big Stuff."

Asarco offers mine tours, but the timing didn't work out for us. We wanted to spend at least 4 hours at our next destination, which I will tell you about on Monday.