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When in Tucson (Arizona), visiting a desert museum sounds like the most un-Arizonian thing to do. Yet there is something wonderful to be said for the flagrant tourist trap that is the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum. The expansive beauty of the American Southwest is captured in an art gallery, zoo-garden, hiking trail hybrid, all concentrated in twenty-one acres of land. As a Midwestern, pop-culture victim, the term ‘desert’ always conjured images of a barren, sepia deathbed or that infinite sand sea from the Scorpion King. Standing in Tucson, on a Tuesday morning in early March, I learned it is a wide-open world of memory-arresting vistas and relief from seasonal allergies. I came to town with few expectations, my mind geared for a three-day student leadership conference. While the University of Arizona campus was a pristinely manicured change of scenery, what bowled me over was the view immediately outside my hotel room door – a mountain’s face stubbled with patchy bushes and a giant “A” foisted cheekily on its side. It seemed like a “gotcha” to us outsiders who thought a dusty cactus was the most we would see. The dry, pollen-less air made my reverent exhale deeper and freer than the season would have permitted back home. The slow mounting heat of each afternoon warmed me inside and out. It carried me through two days of endless ice breakers, then energized my third and final day’s trek through the Desert Museum’s hiking trail and zoo. There was so much unexpected life in the Sonora: cacti and rattle snakes coexisting in the same clime as brown bears and pine trees. All of it looked like a setting for a romance novel. I could not pass up the gift shop with its kitschy nod to the native peoples of the area. Like a tourist, I bought a cheap silver and turquoise bangle to commemorate the experience. My inflamed sentimentality didn’t stop there, though. As the sun set on my last night in town, I reclined on the hotel patio couches with a classmate I had quickly made friends with. I looked up into the string of champagne lights hanging from the nearby columns and surrendered to the feel of the breezy, balmy evening on my shoulders. I never expected that on this school trip to a desert I would relax and come alive.