better part of valor

Lately I've been having this debate with myself about staying home and feeling lousy vs. driving somewhere safer, thereby adding to the pollution. This morning the appropriate course of action was no longer debatable, so today I learned:

• The website for the Tumacacori National Historic Park says there are three missions on 310 acres, but you don't get access to anywhere near 310 acres, not that we were up to a lot of hiking.
• That belltower on the mission everybody has access to was started in something like 1801, but the last priest went back to Spain in 1829, and the mission was abandoned in 1848 and no one ever finished it. Ok, don't quote me on the dates, but it took forever and was abandoned with the scaffolding still up.

That only used up an hour, so we got back on the freeway, where I learned

• The road to Arivaca is a fun biking road on which even I might be able to withstand the traffic.
• From Arivaca, you can get to Arivaca Lake, which, from where we were, was totally unimpressive. Its dirt parking lot was a fine place for lunch, though.
• I can recognize a dog playing chase with another dog when the first one goes sprinting across the road in front of the car in front of us. I say that because I thought, I wonder when the second dog is going to run across the road, just about the time the second dog ran into the front bumper of the car in front of us. I'm pretty sure he at least dislocated his elbow, but he looked alert after a few minutes, and people from the ranch to which he belongs showed up quickly, so we're assuming he'll be ok. I suspect he learned not to run across the road without looking. I learned from a cop who happened by that having three cars stop for an injured dog is unusual, and the cops appreciate it.
• On our way back to town we learned that the Titan Missile Museum looks way more entertaining than going home, so I took a chance and went on the underground tour (which was only three other people, so it smelled pretty decent), where we got to see not only the decommissioned missile, but the control room and the key turning procedure, too. Given that there were a lot of buttons available to be pushed, the whole setup looked remarkably straightforward.
• To make the site into a museum, they had to prove that it couldn't be used to launch a missile, so one of the giant bay doors was stuck open with an observation deck on it, and the other was blocked shut by a lot of concrete on its tracks. The missile had to spend several weeks lying outside on the ground so everybody's satellites could see the big holes cut in the fuel tanks and the whatchamacallit part where the warhead would be.
• There was ancient Roman indoor-outdoor carpet in the control room, but it pretty clearly had had a long time to offgas, and the rest of the place was all concrete and steel, so I did ok in there. It's not every day you get to see a decommissioned missile facility, so I might almost consider making a reservation for a Tuesday at 2 pm when they give ex-crew led tours through the living quarters and everything.