I will start this blog with a series of ‘from the car roadside photos’ that will give you an idea of the type of scenery and roadways we experience on this trip. These are in chronological order and uncropped and untouched so if they seem of low quality just remember that these were mostly taken at 105kph through the car windscreen. This section of our trip covers from Carizozo, NM to Tombstone, AZ over a few days. I will try to label the more interesting shots for you.
To start off how would you like the Australian bush to look like the first two photos? This is what the looney left want by way of ‘renewable energy’. We have come across many skylines like this and often more densely populated by wind turbines. At times they are jungle like in their number. It is also surprising how many are still and doing nothing even on a breezy day. Ugly is all I can say. Solar farms are not as numerous but often take up acres of good land scarring the scenery.
This is followed by ‘donkey town?’ For some reason there were mule statues all over as seen in the next 5 pics. Just out of Carizozo was the “Valley of Fires” where a strange flow of Pahoehoe lava stands out on the edge of town. From here I will allow you to look through the pics as we pass along the route to Tombstone.
After a great injection of “yippee-ki-yay” at Boot Hill and Dodge City we carried on into the Arizona desert but not before a couple of days at a great desert oasis named Elephant Butte. We had tried at our last visit to this area to get here but time caught us out so we weren’t going to miss it this trip. We were ‘pointed’ here by a lady months back while we were at El Paso, TX and now here we are happy to have made it. To repeat myself yet again, New Mexico just keeps throwing up these surprise packages to justify the State Motto “the Land Of Enchantment”.
Here they have dammed the ‘grand river’ known as the Rio Grande to make a fantastic recreational lake that is a holiday hot spot for anyone within a 500 mile radius. The town is set up as a (seasonal) tourist town with lots to do though we were (in our opinion) lucky to be here in the low season meaning no crowds. Nonetheless the downside is that not everything was open and it was 103 degrees again.
The first 13 pictures are of the lake (EB Lake State Park). You can make booking to stay on the lake’s edge and they even have a few powered sites too (I wish we’d have known that before we booked into our RV park). The last five are of a nearby town called (wait for it) “Truth and Consequences”. Known locally as just “T&C” it also depends on tourism but is famous for it’s natural springs and spas.
After a 3 day break we moved on through what I can only say is a time warp to find ourselves in the 1800’s in the OK Corral at Tombstone, Arizona. In this town it is a case of ‘hold on to your hats’, you’re about to experience history. Tombstone has recreated (few timber structure will last 150 years or more) the town back in the 1880’s. Many of the folk in town dress the part and many a cowboy is seen walking down the timber footpath, armed with a pair of 6 shooters on his hip or a Winchester rifle over his shoulder or both. Many of the ladies in the shops wear period clothing while the ‘saloon girls’ all wear fishnets, corsets and lacy knickers. There are horse troughs and a stage coach and hotels all along the street.
We headed, as all tourists do, to the OK Corral to see what they claim is a re-enactment of that famous shoot out between Doc Holiday and the Earp Brothers (Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt) against Tom & Frank McLaury and Billy & Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne. History records it was brief lasting only 30 seconds with 30+ rounds discharged. When it was over Morgan and Virgil were wounded while the McLaury boys died as did Billy Clanton. The interesting part goes on afterwards in the ambushes and retribution that followed the Earp’s and Doc Holiday but that is another story.
The pics that follow the gunfight are in the museum and depict many aspects of the wild west circa 1880. It is terrific that the city administrators have done such a good job in this town and that the shopkeepers here all play their parts well. We had lunch in “Big Nose Kate’s Saloon” and then a beer in the Crystal Palace Saloon. With the temperature again reaching above the 100 degree F (we were actually in a week long stretch of this heat) I longed for more cold beer but we had reservations that night in Tucson from where I am writing this post.
One last place to visit before we left town was the “Bird Cage Theatre” where a painting of Fatima, a belly dancer of great notoriety has hung in the same spot since 1882. If you zoom in on the painting you can see bullet holes just above her navel and another over her head (plus a few less obvious in the photo). Sadly we didn’t have time to go deeper into their museum.
That’s it for this post. As I said we are in Tucson and I am at pains to cull the hundreds of photos we took at the PIMA Air & Space Museum where over 400 aircraft are positioned for our inspection. What a day this was but that will be the next blog post.
Nice art pictures.
Hi Stacey
Don’t hesitate to look through the archives as there are literally hundreds of photos over the past few years.
Garry