It turns out that the Whispering Palms RV Park is only about a mile from the Sweetwater Wetlands Park. Sally had told Ellen about this place. It is a premier biding area in Tucson, a water treatment plant turned into a series of wetlands.
We were up early on Friday morning to visit the park. It is quite the place and Ellen had her first life bird of the day as we got out of Speedy, a Gila Woodpecker on a phone pole right next to the van. The park was set up as a series of ponds and impoundments. The ponds were relatively small, deep and ringed with wetland grasses and cattails, attracting coots, ruddy ducks and grebes. The impoundments were large and shallow and we saw many dabblers as well as killdeer and egrets. They were connected by winding tree and shrub-lined paths which harbored the smaller birds. In all, Ellen found six new life birds and the few hours we spent there: Gila Woodpecker, Verdin, Abert's Towhee, Yellow-headed Blackbird, Anna's Hummingbird and Plumbeous Vireo.
After the morning bird walk, it was time to shop. We needed to re-provision a bit and I had a 2:30 appointment at the Apple Store to have them look at my iPad. When we arrived in Tucson on Thursday afternoon, I called Apple to find out if it could be repaired. The Applecare support tech took me through a bunch of possible actions, most of which I'd already tried, but to no avail. The iPad was in a coma. He made an appointment for me at the Tucson Apple Store on Friday to have a "genius" look at it hands on.
The Apple Store is in a suburb, probably high-end, called Catalina Hills. Almost directly on the route was one of the Tucson Whole Foods, so that was our first stop. It was a fairly new store and had the problem thatI've found at many of the newer ones we've shopped at. They do not have continuous aisles. The supermarket traffic model for many years has been one where the aisles run from front to back with fruits and vegetables on one side, often with the deli section, and usually meats and dairy along the perimeter. This allowed the shopper to just go up and down each aisle, picking up the items wanted.
Whole Foods seems to have abandoned this. Aisles that run front to back are split in the middle of the store and the back aisles are offset from the front aisles. There are some aisles that run side to side. Some areas seem to go both ways. It is not conducive to convenient shopping, particularly in a store that we've not been in before. We muddled through and were finished by lunch time. Lunch was in Speedy.
It was then off to the Apple Store. We got to the mall where it was located quite early, so we wandered around a bit. It is obviously the high-end shopping location with a market, AJ's, that was sort of a combination of Whole Foods and the Fruit Center, with prices to match. Not only were there the higher-end retailers like Crate & Barrel, Talbot's and Williams-Sonoma there, but also Tiffany, Kate Spade and Louis Vuitton. Just the place for an Apple Store.
We finally wandered in to Apple at about 2:15, for my 2:30 appointment at the genius bar...or so we thought. The person who greeted us said that we were awfully early. I answered that 2;15 isn't that early and was reminded that Arizona doesn't use Daylight Saving Time—it was 1:15. Our watches were an hour off.
They took me anyway at 1:15, not that it did any good. The tech at the genius bar had no further luck activating the iPad. We also found out that since it had been refurbished, I needed the serial number to possibly get a replacement refurbished model for $299...but there was no serial number on the back. The refurbishing must have replaced the back. Without the serial number, no inexpensive replacement. My online account only showed the last five characters of the serial number. The only other place place it could be found was on the settings page on the iPad, which, of course, couldn't be turned on.
The only option was a new iPad—not an inexpensive option. I'm now the proud owner of an iPad Air 2, so thin and light, I feel like it will slip out of my grip at any time. It was time to go back to the Whispering Palms and update the new one to the same state as the old one. The official manner of doing this is to turn on the iPad, go through the initialization pages, hook it up to my MacBook, on which there should be a recent backup of the old iPad and use iTunes to load all the apps and data that had been on the old iPad.
That's how it was supposed to work...
In reality, it was turn it on go through the initialization pages, hook it up to the Mac, open iTunes and have it tell you that you have to upgrade the iPad to the latest version of iOS, since it is currently at iOS 8 and the old iPad had been at iOS 9. This had to be downloaded, not a task one could easily do over a wireless connection, it would have been an 8 hour download. Did I mention that we were too far away from the park's Wi-Fi to access it from Speedy? I took the iPad up to the office where I left it for about an hour as it upgraded the operating system. Then I had to go through the initialization pages again.
It was back to Speedy to once again connect it to iTunes and download the apps and data—another couple of hours. Then I had to initialize it again! Was I done?
Not really. It now indicated that I have 47 apps that had to be updated. Evidently my last backup wasn't recent enough, only the 10th of October, and 47 apps had changed since then. That was as far as I could go for the day. Updating apps would have to wait.
It was time for dinner. As it had been a busy day, we decided to go out and asked the campground owners if there was anything within walking distance. There was a diner about a half mile away, so we headed off to it. A good walk was needed anyway.
The diner was in a strip mall next door to a Mexican Supermarket. It was not particularly impressive, but the meals were inexpensive and edible. The most exciting thing was the four guys sitting at the next table. Ellen looked over, then looked back at me and said, "That man is wearing a gun". Then, in a rather startled tone, said "Two more are also wearing guns!" Yup, three out of the four were armed. Arizona is an open-carry state. Welcome to the Wild West.
It was a rather quick walk back to the campground in the dark. You never can tell who's carrying. Of course, they make case that the "bad guys" can't tell if you're carrying, either.
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