Dusk in the dessert is an experience. Here are some photos of the sunset over the Catalina mountains.

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A long time favorite Mexican restaurant of mine is El Charro. So that was our lunch destination for our first day. In attendance were my grandparents Glenna and Walter (who Jasmine met for the first time), my parents Karen and step-dad Ted, and ourselves.

I love tortilla soup, and their’s was amazing. I also had their famous carne seca – “dried in the Sonoran desert sun, our marinated lean Angus beef is shredded & flash grilled with green chile, tomato & onions.”

The tamales are also a specialty, which several of my family ordered and enjoyed.

We had such a good lunch, that we ate there for dinner that night. Whereupon we tried table-side guacamole – a nice experience. I of course had the tortilla soup again.

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We stayed at my parents rental condo, which was very nice. But the only amenity Jasmine cared about was that it had a pool. So starting at 7am, then 8am, and so on… Our little one was asking to go swimming. In fact she asked repeatedly every day, just to make sure we didn’t forget her vacation priorities.

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We started our vacation to Tucson today. The morning was frosty, luckily Jasmine went right to work clearing the car off.

Jasmine is very excited. In fact she has been packed and ready to go for five weeks now. And she made sure to ask us every single day that we should be packing as well, and how come we haven’t yet, and that we only have ‘x’ days before leaving.

The purpose of the trip is for Jasmine to finally meet her great grandparents, for us to visit with parents flying in, and to enjoy the wonderfulness of the desert.

We got to the airport with ample time, so we hung out in the pleasant hall listening to live piano music. This must be a new airport feature, because we noticed live musician’s in various concourses both on our departure and arrival travel days.

It was bumpy but uneventful flight. After landing and getting our rental car, our first destination was to find a local Souper Salad for lunch. A long time favorite of ours when we used to live in the Southwest. It was as good as we remembered. I took a photo of a particularly pretty salad that Emily put together.

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I guess the sun was just too much for our napping cat Little Man. He must have had a late night prowling.

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