Time in Tombstone

[aadler]

As it happened, we chose not to stay that long in Tombstone, despite that it was our original destination and, in other circumstances, we might have remained there the entire winter.

It was a combination of things.

First of all, there’s not a lot of town there. Online sources put the population around 1,400. Pretty much everything there is tourist-oriented … which is fine, we looked forward to checking out what was there.

Second, though, all the brochures said the various attractions were ‘wheelchair accessible’. That turned out to be true, as long as you didn’t mind pushing a wheelchair over packed dirt in various places, and through loose gravel in others. Susan’s mobility is such that there just weren’t many places she could readily go without the wheelchair, and that took more effort than she was willing to demand of me.

Which was in turn aggravated by the parking situation. There was plenty of parking available … but also plenty of tourists seeking the various spaces, and most of the time it wasn’t possible to find a spot closer than several blocks from the intended destination. That wouldn’t have been a big deal for me, but the wheelchair-and-gravel combination made it somewhat more difficult.

(We did, of course, attend the re-enactment of the OK Corral gunfight. It had a lengthy introduction showing/telling how the conflicts between the Earps and the Cowboys had escalated till the day of the confrontation. The actors were engaging and entertaining, with a lot of clearly practiced comic bits that interacted with the audience or played off our presence; the ‘gunfight’ itself impressed me with how fast everything went … which accorded with historical records, that 30 shots were fired by the various participants within 30 seconds. I would have been a terrible eyewitness, because once things started I lost track of everything till the very end, which had Frank McLaury as the last Cowboy to fall. Afterward, various audience members got their picture taken with the actors; Susan was one of them — I took the photo, using her phone — and she promptly posted it to Facebook and sent it to our son in China.)

One of the biggest problems, though — and it shouldn’t bulk so large, but it’s just the way we live — was that the internet available at our chosen RV park was seriously inadequate. As in, so spotty and unreliable that I was unable to access LiveJournal the entire time I was there, other sites were difficult to get to and frequently unavailable as well, and Susan’s mainstay (streaming TV from various providers) was just not possible.

So, after two nights there, we headed back for Deming, New Mexico, where we had happily stayed for a month before we got the news that our son would be in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year. It’s a nice, friendly place, very inexpensive (though we pay for electricity as well as space rental), and close to a Walmart, which we didn’t have in the last two places we stayed.

We have to be back ‘home’ by the end of March: medical appointments, as usual. We’ll be here for at least a month, and after that we’ll decide whether to extend for a bit or take our leisurely time crossing two more states over to get there.

Meanwhile, we’re settled in comfort.