November 18 Tombstone and Bisbee

Mining elevator in
Bisbee

We, well, I got early since Bill is always up early. We went to Tombstone and Bisbee today and wanted to be on the road by 8:30. We just had cereal for breakfast and were on the road early for a change. Since Bisbee was the furthest we decided to drive through Tombstone and start our day in Bisbee. We parked at the end of the main street in the Old Town Bisbee after driving almost all the way through the valley town. Then we stopped in a café for something to drink and to use the bathroom. Bill had tea and I had a latte. We passed on the yummy morning pastries. First stop was the post office across the street for stamps. They seemed have a lot of PO boxes so I asked about delivery service. All the homes and businesses in the old town do not get home delivery. We forgot that there is a whole other town out of the valley where we made our turn. They have 2 other post offices and the rest of the town gets delivery.

On the step of the Copper
Queen Hotel

We stopped in quite a few of the shops, specifically Killer Bee and tested numerous flavors of honey and several shops that had used books. Bill did manage to find one book, so he was pleased. We stopped in the Copper Queen Hotel, which was the first hotel in this silver mining town. At one time there were 20,000 people in the town, then about 30 years later it was down to 9,000. The hotel is very authentic looking still with it’s own saloon. The have a photo display of some of the history of Bisbee. We didn’t go on the mine tour at the Copper Queen Mine since we went on it 23 years ago. The tours are lead by former miners. They still mine in the area for gold, silver, zinc and copper. A shopkeeper told us they get lots of turquoise out and just dump it.

Lunch at Big Nose Kate's

Stagecoach in Tombstone

It was only about 20 minutes to Tombstone and as soon as we got parked we looked at the restaurants for dinner. We chose Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. The ambiance was great, the food was OK. Well, Bill said his burger was really good but my grilled chicken salad was full of small onion pieces and it was too dark for me to find them. I can’t eat raw onion so I picked out anything that looked like onion but still kept getting them in my salad and ended up with a sick stomach later. After lunch we went to some of the shops and took some photos of the 4 guys who play the Earps and Doc Holliday and of the stagecoach. They now charge to watch the gunfight, so since we’d seen it before, we passed. Upon leaving town we drove along another back street to see the places that were included in the stagecoach tour and then drove by Boot Hill, which we’d been to before also.

Deserted building in Fairbanks

When we left Tombstone we had to stop at the Border Patrol. We saw tons of border patrol vehicles inside fences along the road and driving all over. Of course we passed right through. They had a german shepherd sniffing the vehicles. We took a different route back to I-10 and stopped at the ghost town, Fairbanks. It was another mining town that bit the dust once the ore dried up in the area. Again we saw several border patrol cars and once we got on the main road we had to stop at another checkpoint. This one had a longer line of vehicles and again a german shepherd sniffed our truck. They just asked if we are American citizens and we said yes and they sent us on our way.

Carole and Herb had come over and gotten Xena so she roam in their backyard. We stopped by to pick her up and visited a while. We got home around 4:30 and put out our rope lights and put Xena’s bedding from the truck under the RV. It’s doubtful it will rain but we didn’t want our spot to look junky. We sat outside with Xena for a while before heating leftover buffalo brats and baking a couple of sweet potatoes and making salads for dinner. Kam called to go over the mail and I did a bunch of email and caught up on my journal.