Day 14

Miles driven 472 – Total Miles 5163 – Safford, AZ to El Paso, TX – 8 hours on the bike

I woke with the early morning sun again at about 5am as it was warm even up on the mountain in southern Arizona, and I knew the sun would heat things up fast. As I began packing up, I was careful of possible scorpions hiding under the tent or the tarp, but there wasn’t any. A little disappointed at that! I have never held a scorpion and was looking forward to finding one.

As I drove down off the mountain riding south it got warm for being 6 in the morning. I saw my first road runner as I was diving along the highway. He was being chased by Wile E. Coyote on an ACME rocket too… Beep Beep!

My destination this morning is Tombstone Arizona.

The old west has always captured peoples imaginations. I got my start on the old Clint Eastwood westerns on TV, where justice is served up at the end of a revolver. Much later, the movie Tombstone staring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer came out and reminded how much it all fascinated me. I always loved that line of Kilmer’s… “I’m your huckleberry”, which according to some sites I read is from an infamous failed duel he had in the Birdcage theater. What better than to go see where that true “wild west” story happened… in Tombstone Arizona itself.

As I first reached Tombstone, I see a normal small desert town with a few billboard exclaiming the tourist attractions. On the main street coming into town I first come upon Wyatt Earp’s house and just down the street the OK corral. They’re both on a paved street with little fan-fair, and it seems quite out of place to my imagination. But when you go down two blocks, they have kept the street dirt, and the storefronts are in a fairly realistic setting. But inside they’re regular modern stores for the most part.

I really don’t like facades of realism… I want realism, so this facade town wasn’t doing it for me. I asked a local walking down the street about what I should see, and she pointed me to the Birdcage.

The Birdcage was built as an opera house, but let’s be realistic here… you’ve got lonely men out in the desert who are making money from the silver mines and nowhere to spend it… are they going to go to the opera? I don’t think so, and they didn’t, not enough to keep it as an opera house at least. It soon turned into a bar, brothel, and gambling hall that also put on plays watched by drunks with guns. It was the main hangout for the town. Many famous outlaws and lawmen were patrons there.

You can go into the front room for free and see some memorabilia, or pay $10 and go further inside on a self guided tour and see it all. I thought this would be worth the money, so paid for the tour. The most fascinating parts for me were the brothel rooms converted from the opera boxes, that hung out over the floor and only had curtains to separate from the main room; and the poker game that went on for over 8 years straight in the basement. It was a high stakes game that cost $1000 to get in (approx. $30,000 today), and once you paid you were put on a list. When a spot opened up someone came and found you. Doc Holiday and a bunch of other famous gamblers played in the game over the years.
Once they closed down when the mines busted in 1889, they boarded up the building until like the 1930’s when they reopened it as a museum, so everything is pretty much as it was back then. A true slice of history. You could see the bullet holes in places, and they had gathered together many other artifacts from the time to show.

After tombstone, I headed east. It took a few hours to get to Las Cruces, New Mexico where I had a ‘maybe’ couchsurfing setup. It turned out my host wasn’t in town, so I put out an emergency last hour request on couchsurfing.com and Russ from El Paso gave me a call and said come on over.

It was great to shower and clean up again.

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