We got started pretty early to get to a tour on time later in the day.  But I was enjoying City of Rocks too much not to capture more photographs:

 

Panorama from the campsite.  Click for the full-size image:

 

Looking back as we left:

 

We made it to Kartchner Caverns State Park in time for our tour.  The cave was discovered in the 70s, and a good bit of effort has gone into not disturbing the hydrology of the cave so its formations continue to grow.  There’s a misting system that hosed us down as we entered the cave, to keep lint and other particles on us from floating off and sticking to the formations.  The walkway is a concrete trough that is hosed out every night.  It was pretty expensive, I thought, and perhaps not sufficiently different from Carlsbad to be worth it.  No cameras (or anything else for that matter) are allowed in the cave, so this is the best I could do:

 

Next, we continued West towards Tuscon, where we stopped at the Pima Air and Space Museum.  We first did a bus tour of the “Boneyard”, a storage facility for 4,400 planes.  M and I enjoyed the tour, and B and Trish got in a nice nap:

 

 

After that, we toured the museum itself.  It has a number of hangers, as well as 300 or so planes on display outside.  It was over 100 degrees out, so we didn’t spend much time walking the tarmac.

 

After leaving the museum, we visited the Eastern unit of Saguaro National Park.  There was an odd storm coming in, so visibility was pretty poor, and there was a good bit of lightning in the distance.

 

We left Saguaro and headed a bit south to Sahuarita.  The Walmart there doesn’t allow overnight parking, so we overnighted at the Desert Diamond Casino.

 

We drove 307 miles today.  Karchner Caverns (B), Pima Museum (C), Saguaro National Park (D):