Good day everyone!! It’s been a while since we have done our travel blog. We have been in Benson, AZ for the past 4 months, since October. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years have come and gone. We had our tripod Christmas tree set up and our little Christmas tree inside. The holidays just didn’t feel tremendous this year. For one, the tornadoes that wiped out close to 9 states; Mayfield, Kentucky is totally gone. What kind of Christmas did they have? Not a very good one. On top of all the bad weather, we have the new Covid variant that is now in every state in the US. On the first of December we had one case in the U.S., 22 days later it was in every state. When are we going to be done with Covid?? Maybe in the year 2025…We shall see!! If only people would just do what they should, this would get better much faster. I’m not saying it’s going away, it will be around for very very long time to come.
Pictures of our RV site and some pics of a nice rainbow that was during one of our rain storms here, and a few sunset pictures.
We have been in Benson, AZ for a few months and have had a chance to visit a few really interesting places around here. Benson, AZ is a small town that has some history. When you hear stories about Tombstone, Benson was the midway point for Well’s Fargo stage couch to stop on the way into Tucson, AZ. Some robberies happened in Benson, AZ. We drove all around and found that almost every business has a beautiful mural on the side of the building. Here are some of them.
Pictures of Benson, AZ Murals throughout the town.
One of the biggest tourist and popular places to see is Tombstone “The Town Too Tough To Die”, and it’s just 20 miles from Benson. The history of Tombstone is very interesting. You may know the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral with the Earp brothers and Doc. Holiday against the outlaw Cowboys that included the Clanton and McLaury brothers. This is what made Tombstone famous. The finding of silver was really the main thing that made Tombstone get its name and put this little town on the map. They still do reenactments of the O.K. Corral shootouts in downtown Tombstone. There are a few mines that you can tour when you visit this unique little town, along with some great saloons and restaurants.
Mr. Ed Schieffelin was told when he was looking for his big bonanza of silver in that area, he was told all he would find is his own tombstone, so when he found millions of dollars worth of silver, he decided to call this town Tombstone, hence the name of this small town in Cochise County..
It’s a fun town with much to see and great places to eat. There are a lot of original historic buildings and saloons. One is the Bird Cage Theatre, a popular saloon and still one of the original buildings with memorabilia from the late 1800s, we still need to visit this saloon which is now a museum that you can walk through for a small fee.
We still have a few more sites to see here in Arizona. There are a few places around Benson and at this time we have visited Tombstone, Kartchner Caverns, Bisbee, Chiricahua National Monument, Amerind (American Indian) Museum and Triangle T Guest Ranch. There are so many things to see in these small towns. We are going to Bisbee again. It’s such a small town but there is a lot to see and we needed more time. We are going to try to see The Desert Museum outside of Tucson, as well as a few movie set locations where over 100 western movies have been filmed; The Old Tucson studios, Tucson, AZ, Mescal studios, Mescal, AZ (between Tucson and Benson)and few others. Parts of Tombstone movie was filmed in Tombstone too.
Pictures of Tombstone, AZ
We went to Kartchner Caverns State Park. This park has two large caverns to tour and we had a chance to see the better one of the two. You can not take pictures while touring the caverns, so there are no pictures to show, but I will show you some from the internet. (I did not take these pictures shown below.) The State Park also has a really nice campground and a few hiking trails.
Pictures of Kartchner Canvern State Park, the two caverns
Just a few miles south of Bisbee is a town called Lowell, AZ. This town was left in the time zone of 1900s. This is Erie Street, “historic” Lowell, Bisbee, AZ. It felt like we went back in time walking down the street of this little town.
Pictures of Erie Street Lowell, AZ (Click on a Photo for more Information)
We went to Bisbee, a real neat quaint town that seemed to be the biggest Copper mining town in all the United States back in the late 1800s. It ranked1 of 5 Copper mines in the world, producing 25% of the worlds copper back in the days. Bisbee is just 11 miles from the Mexico border. When we went to Bisbee we didn’t have enough time to see all the fun stuff in this town, so we are going again soon. There are lots of little shops, museums and neat little hidden treasure’s.
Pictures of Bisbee, AZ (Click on a Photo for more Information)
We had a chance to see another awesome National attraction;. Chiracahua National Monument. This place is similar to Bryce Canyon, but smaller and without the red stone color. This place has a lot of green moss all over the rocks and a lot of balanced rocks, and pillars. There is very good hiking throughout the canyon.
Pictures of Chiracahua mountains
The Amerind Museum just 15 miles down east I-10 from Benson, is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Native American cultures and their histories. Just a walk around this place with the landscape of hundreds of rocks and boulders on this 1600 plus acres is just amazing.
Pictures of Amerind Museum area, (Click on a Photo for more Information)
Less than a mile from the Amerind Museum is a place called Triangle T Ranch with 160 acres that has some history to it. Established in 1922, the Triangle T Historic Ranch boasts a colorful and exciting past. Apache Chief, Cochise, and his band used the ranch as a winter camp for many generations. Other well-knowns that stayed on the ranch include President John F. Kennedy, General John J. Pershing, and Dr. Leon T. Silver just to name a few. High ranking Japanese from WWII were detained on this ranch: 22 adults and 15 children. Japanese war criminals were detained here for about 5 months, then were exchanged for American POWs. In the 1950s, Part of the land was made into the Amerind Museum as mentioned above. The new owner then built a Saloon/restaurant and opened it up for western movies. Some more famous actors and great western movies and shows were filmed here: the original 3:10 to Yuma 1957, with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, some of the original Lone Ranger, the High Chaparral TV series 1967-71, Stagecoach with Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, & Willie Nelson. A few other movie stars that have stayed at the ranch are Gene Hackman, John “the Duke” Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evens. It was a very unique place to visit and maybe get a drink or dinner at the ROCK Saloon.
Pictures of Triangle T Guest Ranch (Click on a Photo for more Information)
This is only some of what we have done here in Arizona. We will be doing some more between now and the time we head up to Colorado for the summer. We will post some more interesting travels when we get settled up at our Summer hosting job.
So we were going to head back to Spooner Lake State Park at Lake Tahoe, NV after leaving Benson, but they are still renovating the park with a new Visitor Center, a new picnic area and adding an amphitheater. They’re not quite done and won’t be when we want to arrive there, so we found another summer hosting job in Colorado. We did want to go back to Spooner, but we will have to try to get back there in a few years when they are done with the renovations.
We are leaving Benson, AZ April 1st to head to Lory State Park near Fort Collins, CO. Jodi got online and looked for a few State Parks in Colorado, Lory State Park contacted us. We had a Virtual interview and got the hosting job. We are so excited and ready to get back to hosting/doing some work. Fun Fun.. It is a day use State Park, so yes we are all by ourselves during our evenings.
So on our way up to Lory State Park, we have to burn about a month and half to get to up to Colorado without us getting snowed in at some locations. We hope that arriving to the State Park mid May will be good and clear of any snow or snow storms. We shall find out. When we leave Benson we are going to stay in the area of Tucson for a couple of weeks. After that, we are going to Lost Dutchman State Park for a week, then we go to a park in Apache Junction for another week, just a few miles from Lost Dutchman SP. We have been to Lost Dutchman SP before and loved it there. Such a beautiful place and a great place to hike…
We are going to start heading up to Monument Valley, where lots of western films have been shot. This is the Navajo Nation territory covering about 17,544,500 acres. We are going to get a tour of the area, so do hope to see and get plenty of pictures…
We then head further north to Utah up towards Moab, the Arches national Park. Another one of our Bucket list Parks. We do hope again we don’t get snowed out.
Picture of Arches by Adhemar Vargas Baigqorria
From Moab, UT, we are heading into Colorado by way of I-70 into Denver and then up to Fort Collins. Wish us luck. We will be posting some great pictures when we get settled into our summer spot at Lory State Park.
Do hope you have enjoyed this big informational Blog. We want all of our friends and family to be safe and healthy. Stay tuned and see what we will venture to next… Stay in touch and make some comments about any of the photos and or posts and we will respond back. Miss you all and hope to see you again someday soon.
Bobble Head Travelers Mark and Jodi
