Paul McCartney once lived in Tucson. You hear that and you think, "Wow, a Beatle lived there so it must be pretty nice."And then you drive into Tucson and you notice the horrible drivers, the streets choked with telephone wires, trash cans on the sidewalks, homeless people panhandling at every gas station and the many seedy neighborhoods. It's right then, at that exact moment, that you realize something: Paul McCartney, that rich SOB, probably never had to come into Tucson. He had a house out in the hills with a private driveway, armed guards, salivating rottweilers and razor wire and pits with sharpened bamboo spears and bengal tigers. Paul didn't live in Tucson; he lived in the desert near it.
And then something else hits you, something more profound: "I liked John better anyway."
I have a whole sad history with Tucson. Some of it I take out on Paul, who lived there with his late wife Linda (and has now since moved away). But I was excited to go back to Tucson and have fun, and do it under much different circumstances with Sara. And fun we had, although very little of it was in Tucson. Much of our adventure took us southeast of Tucson and beyond.
We started at the Reid Park Zoo, Tucson's quaint little animal park in a skeevy neighborhood south of downtown. For a zoo, it's dirt cheap ($7), and it's charming how simple and clean everything is. I'm used to the Wildlife World Zoo, which is wonderful (especially after they added an aquarium). That zoo is very large, very dusty and, in certain places, it looks kinda cheap — although it's totally not cheap at something like $26 a person. So going to Reid Park was a fun alternative. Highlights include the giraffes, the dancing/twitching elephant, the various monkeys, the kissing anteaters and the otters, which we must have watched play in their lagoon for like 15 minutes.
After that, we wandered back to the freeway and started heading further southeast to Benson for our reservation at Kartchner Caverns, which is this huge cave system that nature carved into the desert limestone. These two college students found them in the ’70s and they've been miraculously preserved by the state since the ’90s. They look wonderful, but to keep all them stalagmites and stalactites ticking there are rules, and they are extensive: no cameras, no phones, nothing held in your hands, no food, no drinks, no purses or bags. And if you take your jacket off inside (because it's hot and humid) then be ready to roll it a very special way. Also, as we walked in we were lightly misted to keep any hair, dust or dead skin cells from becoming airborne. (Remember Charlie Brown's friend Pigpen ... he would have been denied entry.) I was going to be a wiseguy and ask the guide if smoking was allowed, but Sara pinched my arm and wagged her finger — she keeps me from embarrassing myself, or maybe just herself. All the rules were worth it, though, because the caves were amazing.
After that, we made a mad dash further south to Tombstone for lunch and an authentic cowboy experience. Within about 15 minutes I was explaining to Sara that Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner both did versions of Wyatt Earp, and that Costner's was more accurate but Russell's was more entertaining. This took place in Big Nose Kate's Saloon, where I had a cowboy burger in an authentic cowboy bar. How authentic? Well, it had the longhorns above the bar, a painting of a naked lady behind the bartender and buckets of ice in the trough-style urinal. Yee-Haw! After eating and walking through Tombstone's storied streets, we caught the daily showing of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, which was most definitely not worth the admission price — I think the Doc Holliday actor was legitimately sauced.
We also stopped at the original Boothill Cemetary so we could desecrate some graves with our smiling mugs. The sign on the door reminds people they're at a gravesite so to act accordingly, but that's hard to do when you're standing over a headstone that reads, "Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a 44, no less, no more." Or the one that says, "Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake in 1882. He was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he's gone." Hey, that's like executions in Texas nowadays. And I can't forget to mention the Chinese graves, one of which was marked, "Two Chinks."
After scraping the crap from our boots and spittin' our chaw (kidding) we made another mad dash even further southeast — damn near Mexico, hombre — to Bisbee, an old mining community. It was here that we donned yellow slickers, hardhats, leather belts (kinky!) and flashlights to ride a little train way down into the Queen Mine. After the mine closed two decades ago, it has since been turned into a tourist attraction with daily tours. I heard about it from my brother and his wife — thanks, Jay and Char — so Sara and I wanted to give it a whirl. It was a lot of fun. The mine was cold, but our tour guide warmed us up with his colorful narration, which was intentionally drab and monotone. He said he retired to the Honeydews — "Honey, do this," and "Honey, do that ..." He was actually a miner from the mine; and I think he missed his job. Looking up the mine on Wikipedia after our trip, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was in some of the photos on the page. Midway through the tour he pointed to this tall mine car with two seats on the top and said that was the miner's bathroom, and then he offered everyone the chance to stick their hands down inside. Only Sara took him up on the offer — "Hey, look there's candy down there," she said.
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