There's not a lot to say about Tucson. It seems to basically be a smaller version of Phoenix and a little bit cooler, both of which are good things.

In the morning we checked out the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. It's really a zoo in the desert just outside town and was pretty popular on Saturday morning. There were some cool things to see like the roadrunner in the prairie dog cage, the butterfly house and the walk-through hummingbird aviary. Shellie continued her tradition of attracting invertebrates by getting a large butterfly to land on her. We were latched onto by a very friendly old man who "loved Australians" and wanted to talk about square dancing. Many photos were taken.

The afternoon was Shellie time and we headed downtown to the stoner/student district where Shellie picked up a sarong suit but unfortunately declined the silver satin hotpants. Suzi and I had coffee in the Revolutionary Grounds Maoist bookshop/tea room although I was too full to try the fine selection of vegan cakes. We passed by the hydroponics shop, herb store and hookah bar without making any purchases.

Moving on, we reached Tombstone late in the day and checked into the Tombstone Bordello (Shellie's choice) which we were sharing with several middle aged bikers. The couple from Liverpool who run the establishment had moved out to Arizona several years ago after deciding to live the western dream for real rather than continuing their western themed pub in northern England. Seems like a sensible decision.

Tombstone is a town that has done a lot without very much. Basically, it was a bunch of wooden shacks in the middle of nowhere that probably should have fallen down and blown away in the desert wind a long time ago, but a bunch of oddballs have kept it going and managed to squeeze a living out of the OK Corral gunfight myth. It's all rather charmingly ramshackle and unpolished. The OK Corral itself is like somebody's clapped out backyard with some rather creepy stiff animatronic puppets that reenact the gunfight. The Birdcage Theatre museum smells like a cross between a serial killer's basement and your grandparents' sock drawer. It's not entirely clear what the zombie cowboy is doing in the poker room but who really cares? Anyway, Suzi and Shellie enjoyed the eccentric displays of old artifacts and snapped up some very tasteful cowboy boots (Suzi's with yellow, red and aqua insets cut into black leather and Shellie's in luminous turquoise and brown).

Dinner was the usual overly large American portions - in this case a very nice USDA Prime steak and some commendable hamburgers followed by cowboy sized portions of apple cobbler and chocolate brownie. This made it kind of hard to force down the fruit salad, eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns and toast that the brothel owners served up for breakfast, but we made a valiant effort.

Heading further south, we stopped off at the San Pedro river reserve for a bit of birding, but it was hot and the birds were being a bit shy so we moved on to Sierra Verde and stocked up on food for our two days at Casa de San Pedro. Being only a few miles from the border (we can see the fence from the highway), we inferred that the big white blimp hovering over town is some sort of observation platform. Border patrol agents are everywhere down here and we're expecting to have to through several checkpoints on our way out of the area.

This B&B is undoubtedly the best place we've stayed so far. It's a small place with a courtyard and fountain in the middle. There's a salt water pool, good internet access, a laundry, large grounds with access to the river and four kinds of pies baked daily sitting out temptingly, along with oatmeal cookies and brownies. We barbecued our dinner out the back down near the river while hummingbirds buzzed us and quail ran around under the mesquite. The only annoyance is the millions of tentworms that are dropping from the cottonwood trees now that they have stripped the leaves from them. Luckily our invertebrate magnet, Shellie, deflects their attentions from Suzi and me.

Breakfast, needless to say, was too large again. We were distracted from our massive portions by roadrunners running around in the garden outside. Today is a day for laundry and relaxing as tomorrow will be a long drive to El Paso after Suzi's birding pal takes her up into the mountains for some hot bird action in the morning.

IPad is proving to be a wonderful toy. It's an unmatched content consumption device - this is how the internet, google maps and browsing photos was meant to be. It's also going to be a great gaming device when some decent software starts coming out. Sitting around it playing Small World is a new kind of board gaming experience where you don't have to count tokens, check rules or worry about bumping the board. Makes cheating a bit hard though.

But the IPad is pretty useless as a work machine. Typing gives me a cramp and the lack of windows and multi-tasking makes serious work on it pretty much a joke. It really occupies a new niche, somewhere between a laptop and a smart phone. It's not a niche I was aware needed filling until I held one in my eager, sweaty hands.