Biosphere Trip

Ok, so we went to Biosphere 2. It looked like it could be cool. It was, well, kind of neat, but not really worth the $20 tour cost. Maybe I was expecting too much. I don't know. It was kind of nice to see a significant amount of green plants after spending a week in the desert. (BTW: there are a lot more plants in the desert than I ever expected. This still amazes me.) There was a man-made ocean environment, a rain forest environment, and a desert environment, as well as the human environment.

There used to be people living in Biosphere 2, but they haven't been there for a while. We couldn't really see much of the human environment, as it was mostly closed off. I don't know that it would have been too bad to live in Biosphere. When I first heard that there were people that lived inside for 2 years, i assumed that they would be completely incommunicato with the outside world, but apparently not. They had faxes, phones, tv, radio, and maybe the internet (I'm not sure if the internet really existed while they were in there).
The most interesting part of the whole tour was actually the engineering involved in keeping the Biosphere from imploding and exploding. There was this hugh lung type system. It would expand and contract with the air pressure, as this was a closed system, and there was no where for the air to go when it expanded due to temperature changes.
So that was pretty much it for the Biosphere part of the trip.

On the way to the Biosphere we stopped at the Casa Grande National Monument. It was alwo kind of interesting. Not overly exiciting, but what can you really expect. . . . it was the ruins of a previous civilization near the town/city of Coolidge.

Other interesting facts:

• Historic Florence has 3 prisons, and a prison gift shop. We didn't actually stop at the gift shop, but it looked like it could have been interesting.
• Adam's Mile is at mile marker 108 on Arizona highway 79 (maybe)

Ok, so "Interesting" is a VERY relative term :)

I think that is about it for this post.