Wayback Machine…

Back in late Aug. 2025, went to the Milton Freewater Street Fair.

I forgot my camera so I used my new-to-me Motorola phone with it’s 3 lenses and fancy-schmancy photo taking setup and settings. Well, when I got home, I couldn’t figure out how to get the pics transferred to my PC so I can post them on my blog. Tried to get them downloaded several times after that over the months but I gave up and also over the months have taken many additional shots with my phone and finally, just the last couple days worked hard to figure out how to get them downloaded to the PC like a normal human/machine.

First problem is with the phone’s magical type of formatting. Turns out that a user MUST use a special cable, USB – USBc standard connectors but somehow the cable is special. Of course I hadn’t read about that when I first got the phone but when I did a google search about it, finally discovered that little quirk IN FEBRUARY 2026! Rooted around in my cables until I found the cable that came with the phone. It worked! So, finally solved that issue.

Second problem was the formatting was changed several times when I was messing with the phone’s settings on-the-fly and wouldn’t download the pic if it had a certain format…the bytes would be zero when others would be over 1 M bytes. Since my PC had problems with many of the pics and wouldn’t download I had to ‘Share’ each problematic pic to my email address and save them that way. Over 30 photos, one at a time. Grrr. That was a few days ago, and yesterday, suddenly it worked to download all 125 photos from my phone to the PC. And I didn’t change anything.

Well, anyway, it ended up since all those problems that only yesterday I finally figured out how to download all the pics, edit them (reduce them to 800X600), and in the downloads I found this set from back in late August and I’ll be posting them today.

We go back to Aug. ’25 and the Milton Freewater Street Fair that they hold every year. I just wandered around the streets like a bozo and took a bunch of random shots while playing with the phone’s camera features.

Fire engine water carrier on display and since it was hot, they’d set up a misting system for everyone.

Vendors of the odd and weird offering their wares in the street. Others offering info on various public interest groups.

Tried out the zoom feature in the phone…standard 3X first.

Then 1X…worked well. Can either use fingertips to squeeze or expand the view.

Here’s the new fire engine and crew standing by in case someone collapses from heat stroke.

There was a motorcycle contest too.

I’d gotten there a little before this was set up in the square. Doesn’t take long for them to get everything set up though.

Lots of food vendors, wine vendor, and a beer vendor. There’s a band in this square over to my left. It was still early so not many customers for the food vendors yet. It got crowded later.

My daughter works at this cheese place on this street and they were open so she had to work…

I went in for some free cheese samples and one of their icecream cones. And here she is working! Poor thing.

So those are the long delayed pics from the street fair. I was new to the phone camera so I was more preoccupied with messing/setting that and playing with it other then composing the shots so I see they don’t really tell a good story. Well, whatever.

Back to the present…Feb. ’26

I’ve been coming to Tucson for 5 years or so and although we discussed it a time or two, I’d never been to the two major Museums here in town. One is the Titan Nike Missile Museum down south of town but this year we decided to go. Most of you are too young to remember much about the nuclear standoff age but I do. So most of these pictures are of a situation and time of life where nuclear war was an ever present background to life here in the USA. This missile base we toured was mostly secret back then but the Russians knew about it shortly before or after it opened. It’s far enough south from Tucson that if it took a hit, most of Tucson would have been damaged and likely only a few thousands would have died or been injured if Russia attacked them. But believe it or not, 18 missile bases were built around Tucson with multiple missile silos…this one is the only one left as a museum. They made Tucson a prime target.

After the museum proper, you head outside to roam the grounds with the military displays.

And you can get a view of the silo and missile from topside.

I stood on a small platform to get this shot and when I stepped off, I noticed a really faded sign under that step that said “Watch for rattlesnakes”. YIKES. Didn’t see any though.

After that topside tour, when headed down into the control room. Something like 50 feet underground.

Tours are limited to 25 at a time, and our tour guide was excellent. Veteran herself but knows this site. I already knew about most of the stuff she talked about having watched many movies that depicted things here, along with several documentaries over the years. There were 4 military in here at all times, 2 on watch and 2 resting in their quarters nearby.

I asked her what the 2 spare military guys did during an attach sequence and she didn’t say, but I believe that they left their quarters during the alarms, ran down to control, and had their hands on their side pieces in case one of the operators refused to do his job or went rogue.

The entire underground facility has these giant springs supporting the floors just in case of a nearby nuclear blast.

She walked us through the firing procedure and if I remember, she said that it only took 30 seconds to launch from a verified presidential order which had to be decided within 10 minutes of the president being informed of a nuclear attack.

After that presentation, we head down this long hallway to the actual missile silo I took a picture of from above. This shot is looking back to the control room from the entrance to the silo.

It was kinda scary back then, especially during the Cuban missile crisis but I never doubted that cooler heads would prevail on either side of the cold war. But it’s probably more dangerous now that rogue nations like Iran and N. Korea have nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them. Modern nucs can be secreted in a suitcase these days and wipe out a major city if someone was intent on sneaking one or more into any country.

So, that’s the story of that museum. Interesting for us old fogies that lived during those times.

Thanks for reading!