Tuesday Travels: Tucson for the Weekend

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while, and I figured it’s time to get back into the swing of things.

I have to admit, we are in desperate need of vacation and unfortunately will not have one until we figure out the house ordeal. We have decided to reward ourselves with a tropical vacation as soon as we close on a house. SOOO within the next 4 to 6 months… Depressing!!!! Especially when you it has almost been a year since our cruise.

There’s a lot more coming your way in regard to travel in the next few weeks, including a few posts about planning, spending and of course saving for the perfect vacations. But for now, we’ll talk about our little 4 night, 5 day trip to Tucson to check out our new town and find a house.

Our itinerary looks something like this:

09/29/11 around 2:00 PM – Arrive at Tucson International Airport

09/30/11 – Touring neighborhoods

• Since neither Husband nor I have ever been to Arizona or Tucson, we’ll be checking out some of the neighborhoods that our Realtor recommends
• Then we’ll maybe see a few new build homes, and talk about time frames and costs
• We’ll explore a few places such as the malls, entertainment and so on based on recommendations from friends who have lived in Tucson

10/01/11 – House hunting begins

• We’ll spend the day looking at a few re-sale homes that we have picked ahead of time
• Taking lots of pictures and hopefully starting to narrow down neighborhoods

10/02/11 – More of that house hunting crap joy

• We’ll see a few more houses…
• I’ll take more pictures…
• We’ll fight… become stressed and start emotional eating. This may also lead to us instinctively booking an overly expensive vacation and blowing our down payment on new shoes, twin turbos and a new transmission for the 3000GT…

We will be fling back to Colorado on the 3rd… hopefully with a better idea of what we want, where we want and what we are willing to spend on a certain type of house.

One thing we are going to try and do is visit the Gates Pass, since it’s located right outside of downtown Tucson.

Gates Pass

 

The Gates Pass is located off of the Speedway and along the rout to West Saguaro National Park. It is said to be a very popular sightseeing area, especially when it comes to viewing sunsets. According to TripAdvisor there are many pullouts and two overlooks where you can stop to view the surrounding scenery.

Have you been to Tucson?! What would you recommend doing? What is your one-must see/do in a new town?

I know we’ll be testing out a few Mexican restaurants, since the Hubs is OBSESSED with tacos, and the closest Barnes and Nobel.