Monday, April 16, 2007

The missing early days

Barbara was looking over the blog and brought to my attention that there were a few early days missing from the blog, that I should ad in before I forget about them completely.
After the first night in Tucson, we headed out to Bisbee Az, and stayed there two days. Cool little town - it was the metropolis along the route from TX to California in its day, and had quite a booming "entertainment industry". Later, mines took off and they pulled copper, silver, tin, gold and traces of other stuff from the area in profusion. There are over 2500 miles of mine shafts under Bisbee - far enough to have dug to New York City...
We went on a mine tour - ok, so Barbara got clostro and had to jump the train, but at least B and I did the mine tour. Pretty interesting really, but definitely pushing the attention span of a 3 year old as well. Amazing stuff they did for the last hundred years there - mining first with candles as only light source, and mules to pull ore to surface.
When copper prices collapsed in the early 70s, the then mayor of Bisbee decided to try to make the town a tourist attraction, and applied for and received a federal grant to recomission one of the closed mines for tourism. Thus the tour - given by one of the miners.
Then we went on to Roswell, which is decidedly something that you only need to spend a few hours in to get the flavor of. Went to the museum there, took some pictures, and got out of dodge. Alien lamp posts, alien coffee joints, conspiracy this and that. Enough to make even an x-files fan sick...
From there, continued on to Amarillo Tx.

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