Arizona

Amazon

Phoenix, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
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See the magic that happens after you click ‘buy’ on Amazon by touring Phoenix's fulfillment center and see first-hand how we deliver for our customers

Cerreta Candy Company

Glendale, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
33.53764, -112.174919

The Cerreta?s strive to create a fun, lively atmosphere where everyone can see candy magic being made. Take a special guided tour of our family owned hometown candy factory. We?ll show you how a sea of caramel becomes wrapped tempting taste treats. Learn how cream centers are enrobed in luscious chocolate.

D3 Tasting & Cocktail Room

Cottonwood, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
34.748400, -112.026984

The first tasting room for Desert Diamond Distillery located in Kingman AZ, this is the first craft distillery tasting room in AZ, although there are several by now. Taste AZ home grown spirits. We make four rums and a vodka right now, and in 2016 a whiskey will be released at the end of the year. A waiting list is being populated, please email if you would like information.

Davis-Monthan's Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center Facility

Tucson, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
32.141369, -110.862802

The Famed Airplane Graveyard / Bone Yard at Davis Monthan Airforce base in Tucson Arizona. Hundreds of B 52 Bombers await the smelter, as per the Salt 2 (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) treaty with Russia. These bombers were laid out and chopped into pieces with a giant crane controlled guillotine. They were left in this state so they could be photographed by Russian Spy satellites for proof of compliance with Salt 2. Shot in 1994 this photograph shows an important part of Cold War History. After a few months trucks hauled away the scrap metal to be recycled at the local smelter. These famous relics are most likely beer and soda cans now. If you click on the image above a larger view of the complete image will pop up in another window.

The Airplane Graveyard, is not just a fence around piles of out dated scrap metal, millions of dollars of surplus parts are salvaged to keep other active aircraft flying. You can think of this place as a huge warehouse for all types of spare parts which saves taxpayers millions of dollars every year. Many people think the government sells flying airplanes to the general public, this is not true. Anything the government sells, which could cause potential injuries, like a life raft, pilot helmet, or a flying aircraft will be "demilled" before it leaves the base. Demilling which stands for De Militarize, includes slashing rafts with a razor knife, crushing helmets, or in the case of an airplane chopping the wings off, or cutting the fuselage into three pieces. Some of the aircraft stored at the Bone Yard are turned into remotely controlled drone aircraft like what was done with the F-106 drone program.

Desert Diamond Distillery

Kingman, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
32.258811, -113.950623

International award winning spirits available to taste. Clear white rum, dark rum, agave rum (the customer favorite) and barrel reserve rum. We also have a sugar cane based Vodka.

Good Enough Mine Tour

Tombstone, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
31.7116224, -110.0663312

Ed Schieffelin had a dry sense of humor. When he filed his first mining claim in 1877 he named it "Tombstone," because he'd been told that his tombstone was all that he would find in the parched, Apache-ruled hills of southeast Arizona. A year later, when he filed his second claim, he named it "Good Enough" because the silver ore was so rich that it was good enough to satisfy him.

Thousands of fortune-seekers followed Schieffelin, hoping to duplicate his success, opening dozens of other mines (Ed, alone, had 19). Above ground, the boomtown of Tombstone was born and flourished. But silver prices eventually fell, the veins of ore played out, and the town died. The mines were used as garbage dumps and then sealed shut.

Tombstone eventually resurrected itself as a tourist attraction. But if you ask the average Tombstone tourist WHY all those Wild West types had been living in this otherwise godforsaken part of the world, drinking and gambling and fornicating and killing each other -- you'd probably get a blank stare.

Andree and Shirley De Journett want to change that. Andree is Tombstone's ex-mayor; Shirley is a geologist and Andree's wife. For years they envisioned opening the Good Enough mine as an attraction and a missing link in Tombstone's history. They got their chance when the company that owned the property was told, "It's not worth anything, it's dangerous, get rid of it,'" said Shirley. As a measure of its perceived value, the mine was bought by Andree for only $2,000, but he had to pay $60,000 an acre for the surface property above it. He and Shirley then spent six years cleaning out the trash, sand, and rock and making the Good Enough reasonably tourist-safe. They finally reopened it on March 15, 2007.

Visiting the Good Enough makes one thing immediately clear: the silver miners in Tombstone had an easy daily commute. The mining district begins literally a block south of town, and it only takes 30 seconds to walk from the souvenir shops on Toughnut Street to the Good Enough entrance. It's probably the most convenient mine/cave tour in America. It's also dry, dark, and cool, attributes that should not be discounted in the SPF 50 climate of Tombstone.

Unlike the precise symmetry of, say, a coal mine or a salt mine, the Good Enough is a man-made cave. Passages twist and turn, sometimes enlarging into big rooms with soaring ceilings, with the empty spaces where the veins and bodied of silver ore were dug or blasted out by the miners. The mine goes a thousand feet out this way, hundreds of feet down that way. Shafts disappear into the abyss just off of the tour route -- future attractions, no doubt, in the De Journett's subterranean empire, as the Good Enough abuts the Toughnut, Lucky Cuss, West Side, and other mines, running even under the town itself.

Tourists don plastic miner helmets and bright green safety vests (Why? Perhaps it's easier to spot a wayward tour member wandering off the tour route, or at the bottom of an undeveloped shaft...). Groups are shepherded down a steep flight of wooden steps into the main mine tunnel.

Andree knows every vein of ore, every mineral outcropping, every original wooden post, every detail of construction. He spits out facts at every turn and nubbin; the man's energy is impressive. He shows us where he paved and flattened the floor of the mine with concrete and red clay (It used to be all rocky).

He recounts how he paid two guys to live in the mine for six months just to wash the walls so that tourists could "see the color" of the various ore veins; "If this was a working mine," he tells us, "you'd see nothing." He explains how he had to dig this room out by hand, blast that passage out with compressed air.

Andree even notes wherever he bumps his head, and paints those rocks blood red, a helpful visual cue that eco-sensitive natural caves can't copy. We don't known if his choice of color was meant for visibility or camouflage, but it certainly made us duck.

Andree and Shirley have big plans for their attraction. A shelter is being built over the mine entrance; burros will be imported to work mine equipment and charm the young; a blacksmith shop will be built along with gift shops and a restaurant and bar. Old miners shacks will be brought in and retrofitted as tourist cabins, so that visitors can spend the night in a miner shack.

"It's a job, isn't it?" Andree asks with a catbird grin worthy of Ed Schieffelin. "But work is cheap. I'll make it work."

Karsten Manufacturing Corporation

Phoenix, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
33.44826, -112.075774

The distinction between manufacturing clubs and assembling them was not lost on PING inventor Karsten Solheim more than 40 years ago. Nor is it today. The family-owned company prides itself on closely controlling the entire clubmaking process.
We begin in design and engineering where new ideas are tested every day with the goal to design the perfect custom-fit golf club.

Those ideas become a reality when molds for clubheads are machined, then transferred to the foundry for investment casting. Next they are heat treated, then on to assembly for component matching and personalization.

From engineering to investment casting to calibration of every club bearing the PING name, quality is assured at every phase. PING is ISO-9001-2000 & 14001 certified, a worldwide standard for quality assurance and environmental systems. Best known in the aerospace industry, this certification means we've raised another standard. Our own.

Queen Mine Tours

Bisbee, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
31.4400192, -109.9123984

Outfitted in hard hat, miner?s headlamp and a yellow slicker, thousands of Bisbee visitors descend into the Queen Mine Tour each year?heading underground and back in time. Tour guides, retired Phelps Dodge employees, lead the group 1,500 feet into the mine and recount mining days, techniques, dangers and drama. Adding a personal touch, the miner-turned-tour guides help visitors experience what it was like to work underground.

Five tours depart each day, seven days a week, from the Queen Mine Tour Building, located immediately south of Old Bisbee?s business district, off the U.S. 80 interchange.

Steward Observatory Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab

Tucson, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
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They manufacture some of the largest mirrors in the world. Excellent tour.

The Mineral Discovery Center

Sahuarita, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
32.001179, -111.0013732

One of the largest open-pit copper mining operations in the entire country, ASARCO is one of the only Arizona giants to provide a tour. Highly recommended if you're in the Tucson area, the tour welcomes both those in favor of and opposed to open-pit copper mining and its environmental consequences.

The Mineral Discovery Center screens a short propaganda piece called "Mining for Music" and the science exhibits and displays of historic mining equipment from what was once Arizona's biggest industry are impressive in scope and scale.

Some of the exhibits demonstrate how copper deposits are formed naturally in the earth, how miners extract copper minerals from the rock to produce nearly pure metal, and more.

The Mission Mine has an average grade of only about 0.67 percent copper, which means that every ton - or 2,000 pounds - of ore that comes out of the mine produces only 13 pounds of copper. In addition, for every ton of ore, about three tons of waste rock must be removed. To keep the pit economically feasible, engineers use sophisticated equipment that tracks progress. When the price of copper is low, miners work on excavating areas with higher-grade ore.

The Mission Mine is about two miles across and a quarter-mile deep. About six times the amount of earth that was moved to form the Panama Canal has been mined at this site.

The Peanut Patch

Yuma, AZ

Lattitude/Longitude
32.640858, -114.558566

The tour of The Peanut Patch, will teach you how peanuts are processed and stored.

One of the highlights, of course, is the roasting area. Here, you'll be able to watch hundreds of pounds of peanuts dry-roasted at once. You'll also have a chance to taste a warm, newly-roasted peanut. In the Kitchen, you and your family can watch peanuts ground into natural peanut butter, and see how peanut brittle and other types of candy are made. On some of the children's tours, kids even get to make their own peanut butter!