Tripometer – 12,850 mi
Gas Gauge – 963.196 gal
Location – Tombstone RV Park & Campground, AZ
Lodging – $37
Cans of OFF – 4
Cell signal at this park is awful. Kelly tried working at the campsite but very quickly abandoned the picnic table for a table outside of the RV park rec room. Over the next few hours Kelly was joined by several other similarly disgruntled remote workers forming an impromptu work club on the front veranda of the Tombstone RV park. You can’t make this stuff up!
As soon as Kelly completed her work for the day, we climbed in the car and drove into Tombstone. Tombstone is listed on the National Register of Historic Places but we discovered online and in person that they are being threated with de-listing due to questionable historic practices in the town. What exists in Tombstone today is a weird mix of truly authentic old west history with carnival, side show icing on top. The number of tourists in town was incredibly small even though it is mid-week during the school year. There were no waits in any store or attraction and we enjoyed a relatively leisurely walk up and down main street with the dog, loving the lack of tourists. Again, we were stunned to find that Tombstone is extremely pet friendly. As we were walking from the car to the downtown district we got hawked for several attractions and asked to bring our dog. Many of the shops on main street have signs permitting dogs in the stores and many stores without signs invited the dog in personally.
To get a proper lay of the land, we hopped on a tourist trolley for the official 20 min tour of town. Ranger joined us in the back row. Prior to this trip we have both seen several movies featuring the story of Tombstone and through some internet searches on the drive here we pieced together the true story versus what we’d seen in the movies. The tour of town didn’t reveal any new information on the gunfight at the OK Corral, but it did yield a few pieces of trivia about the town of Tombstone that don’t appear in the histories that we had read. Firstly, Tombstone is home to the Guinness Book of World Records’ largest rose bush. The rose bush was brought to Tombstone in 1885 from Scotland and has been lovingly tended to ever since. It covers over 9,000 square feet and its gnarly truck is roughly 12 feet around! Secondly, Tombstone was the long time home of Emmitt Kelly Jr., also known as Willey the Clown or the most famous clown ever. Lastly, the image of the side yard above is the Tombstone courthouse. If you look carefully behind the building you can see the (reconstructed) gallows from the first hangings to occur in Tombstone in 1884. How’s that for morbid tourism?
We had an option to see a 30 minute comedy gunfight for 5 more dollars when we bought our trolley tour tickets. Of course we opted in. Again, dogs were invited but we were warned ahead of time that there would be lots of shooting during the show if our pup was frightened by gunfire. We were fairly sure Ranger would be fine, as he’s been around gunfire and fireworks and has never shown distress. As the show started and the gunfire commenced, Ranger started showing ever-increasing signs of being uncomfortable, culminating in Kelly having to take him out of the show. We think it was the gunfire combined with the actors behaving rather erratically. With the distraction that Ranger caused we didn’t get any good photos of the show itself, but we got a nice shot of the show’s set!
On our way to Tombstone yesterday we were looking forward to watching the 1993 ‘Tombstone’ movie starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Bill Paxton, and Sam Elliott before we toured the town. When we arrived at the RV park and didn’t have sufficient cell signal to download the movie, we were all but heartbroken. In town today our #1 goal was to find a copy of the movie so that we could watch it tonight. Surprisingly, we found the movie on sale at only one store on our first day in town. Even at $22 we decided that we had to watch the movie while in town. We grabbed a copy and ran back to the trailer for movie night.