An adventure with my daughter and my friend

#25  Be a tourist in Arizona

#29b  Do touristy stuff with Jessica

#52  Go to a dinner and a movie theater

Some of the things I have enjoyed planning are the adventures I am going to have with my family.  This month, it was time to have an adventure with my daughter, Jessica.  Her choice of adventures was to go to Crossroads movie theater in Tucson, a movie theater that serves dinner.  This gives a whole new meaning to dinner and a movie!  I added a couple of things to our adventure--I wanted to tour San Xavier del Bac, and I wanted to go to a miniature museum I had seen in Tucson.  A friend of mine, Felicia, was also in Tucson for a few days, so she joined us for our adventure.

Our first stop was San Xavier del Bac,an over 200-year-old Catholic church that is about 10 miles south of Tucson. http://www.sanxaviermission.org  The San Xavier mission was founded in 1692 by Father Eusebio Kino.  Later, as the current church was being built in the late 1700’s, the money ran out, so the belltower on the right was not finished.  Since they want to keep it authentic, they won't ever finish it!

 Felicia, Jessica and me in the parking lot, ready for a tour!

We visited the gift shop before the tour. I did not have to look very far to find something I wanted to buy there. I collect nativity sets, and they had an abundance of them! I chose my favorite one, then saw the one that looks like San Xavier del Bac, so I had to get it, too. At that point, my budget was spent, so when I saw all of the nativity ornaments, I couldn't get any! Luckily, I know how to get back there, and, before Christmas, I will be going back to get an ornament or two.

My favorite, San Xavier del Bac, and my birthday present from Felicia

I was amazed by the amount of artwork in the church.  I can’t even imagine the amount of time it took to complete all of it.  First, just finding the wood in the desert for all the carvings would take a very long time!  The docent told us that many of the statues needed to be transported from Mexico City, a one year round trip by ox cart.  I admire that type of dedication and commitment.  

A very small portion of the artwork 

By the time the tour was over, we were thirsty, hungry, and hot.  The only place that had air conditioning was the gift shop.  The church just had a lot of open windows to catch breezes and a few fans to help create a few more breezes.  It was a bit warm!  We bought some fry bread and water on our way to the car.  My fry bread with red chili was very good!

As we headed back to Jessica’s apartment to cool off, Felicia mentioned that she had some coupons for food at Arby’s.  One of the coupons was for free food, so we decided to use them.  As we looked at them, we found they were only good for the Arby’s across town, but decided it was worth it because it was free food.  After we drove all the way across town, we found out the coupons were not good until a few days later!  Laughing, we decided that driving all the way across town for coupons that weren’t good yet was just part of our adventure!  Having a plan that fails makes for a much better story than having a plan that works perfectly! We ended up eating Arby's food, even though we didn't have coupons that worked, because we had spent almost the entire drive talking about what food we were going to order, so we were very hungry for Arby's!

That night, we got to go to the Roadhouse movie theater.  https://crossroads.roadhousecinemas.com  

Jessica’s friend, Alex, and Jessica’s roommate, Chelsi, went with us.  I really like the idea of dinner and a movie at the same time.  The nice thing was that the movie was a regular priced movie we didn’t spend more on food than we would have for popcorn and soda.  The choices were bigger, too.  We could have ordered anything from popcorn and appetizers to pizza and burgers. We also got to sit in recliners. You can't get much better than that!

I need to get better at taking pictures. I don't have any good pictures from this part of our adventure! I do have a couple of pictures of people with very strange expressions on their faces......but I want them to still speak to me, so I won't post them!

Unfortunately, we did not have time to go to the museum on this adventure.  That’s OK.  Now we just have an excuse for another adventure!