Tumacácari, lost children, & Saguaro

Today we visited another mission, this time along the Juan Bautista de Anza trail.

As we were driving north from the Nogales area toward Tucson, we were entertained by the fact that all the roadsigns listed things in kilometers instead of miles. Like yesterday's cell phone adventure, it reminded us that all though we thought we were in the U.S., maybe we were really in Mexico. Haha.

The Tumacácori mission was established in the 1600s and they built at this location in the 1750s.

It was started by Jesuit priest Father Kino but because of orders from the king of Spain in the late 1700s, the Jesuits were all recalled in the Franciscan order took over the mission work.

The mission was in Mexico until the Gadsden purchase in 1848.

It was almost fully deteriorated when President Roosevelt declared a national monument and it was restored to the current condition which is still very deteriorated.

This mission was typical with a small church (above) and orchard (below) and buildings for holding crops and a wall around the outside.

Water was brought in acequias from the nearby Santa Cruz river.

The mission is along the trail the Juan Bautista de Anza national historic trail that is over 1200 miles long and connects several missions in Arizona with  missions in California.

We hiked a piece of that trail together. The Presidio was less than 4 miles up the trail. It was around lunch time and Scott and I decided to make lunch in the RV while the kids hiked the last 1/2 mile alone and checked in at the ranger station at the Presidio. Our plan was to meet them there, eat lunch and be on our way. But that was not to be. ):

Instead, the children continued on the trail, missing the turn toward the Presidio and continuing on toward the California missions!

We arrived at the Presidio with lunch ready to serve expecting to be on the road in a few minutes. However, the children were nowhere to be found. We drove back to where we had left them and began searching the trail for them. Almost immediately we recognized that there was a different way they could have gone. So we started up that part of the trail they were not supposed to go on, but did not know how far to go or where it would lead (other than California). So we asked a local where we could drive our car to in order to intercept the trail. We were told to go down a certain road, but this road ended and we were pulling the trailer and it was a little rough turning around. The local head seemed nice enough, but for someone who pulls horse trailers herself, sending someone with a huge travel trailer down to the dead end is a little suspicious.

Since the road that ended at a golf course, I got out and walked through the course to the trailhead at the other end while Scott drove back into the little town to search the streets and see if they somehow popped out of the trail and were wandering the town.

We were not too worried as all four children were together and it was the middle of the day and it didn't seem like a rough area.

About an hour later we got a phone call from the children asking them to come pick us up and giving us a specific address. They had gone up the trail 2 1/2 miles. At one point, they climbed through barbed wire to continue on the trail because they could still see the trail markers on the other side of the barbed wire. Eventually, they realized they had gone too far and came out of the trail where they could see a neighborhood and knocked on a door to give us a call.

When we pick them up, the gentleman who owns the house told us that the barbed wire is up because border patrol is frequently in this area looking for people and that it wasn't the safest place for the children to be rooming alone. Oops! 

Well, as Ma Ingalls would say, "All's well that ends well."

We are so thankful to the Lord for protecting our children and helping them to keep calm and find help when they needed it.

Onward!

Saguaro National Park, about an hour up the road, was our next stop and where we would stay for the night.