Arizona – Wilcox, Chiricahua, Benson
March 20: Silver City, NM to Willcox, AZ
We left Silver City after filling up the propane tank (for heat and cooking) and drove south to get back on Interstate 10. We stopped at Steins Ghostown on the Arizona border. Just a few old buildings that didn’t look like much, so we continued on. There was heavy truck traffic and high winds buffeting the RV – terrible driving conditions. We stopped at a snowbirds’ mobile home park and campground where we had full hookups, a nice laundry and wireless internet access. We spent the afternoon doing laundry and watching the golf match – guess who did what….
March 21: Willcox, AZ & Chiricahua
We drove ½ hour south of Willcox to Chiricahua National Monument through a broad, flat plain encircled with mountains. We weren’t expecting so many mountains in New Mexico and Arizona and we were pleasantly surprised to find beautiful mountain scenery and not just desert! Chiricahua was much more impressive than we expected, too. Chiricahua is known as the Land of Standing Up Rocks and is technically a Sky Island where isolated mountains rise above the surrounding grasslands. 
We drove the eight-mile scenic drive through the incredible rock pinnacles and we hiked among them down to the canyon bottom (500’ descent within 1 mile) and back up (350’ ascent within ½ mile) – almost 4 miles total. The winds continued with temps only in the 60s--much cooler than we’d like. In the distance, we saw a dust storm that was a couple miles long and we’re glad we didn’t have to drive through it. Overall, a great day full of unexpected beauty. 
March 22: Willcox, AZ
We played golf at the town course, and decided to use a cart after walking 4 miles the previous day. The 18-hole golf course turned out to be a 9-hole course played twice, but the $14 price was right.
March 23: Willcox, AZ to Benson, AZ
Benson is just a short hop from Willcox and we arrived at the campground by mid-morning. We tried to get tickets to Kartchner Caverns – the most recently discovered caverns in the US. We were told that tickets won’t be available till April unless we want to get in line by 7am to get the few non-assigned tickets available. Hey, we’re retired and don’t get up that early!
We drove down to Tombstone instead and watched the show they gave at the OK Corral. A couple of skits were pure comedy and one was supposed to be re-enactment of the gunfight at the OK corral between Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday versus the Clantons and McLaurys. 
We stopped at the “Tombstone Epitaph” newspaper office that had an old, tacky diorama of Tombstone from the 1800s. They also had some of the old type and printing machines.
We did learn that Tombstone’s major claim to fame was its perseverance – fires, silver boom, silver bust, and silver mine flooding all tried to make a ghost town out of Tombstone, but the city held on and is now a combination small town and big tourist attraction.
Lots of old buildings along the original main street of Tombstone, most of them turned into gift shops. One was the Birdcage Theater which had a balcony – but this balcony was subdivided into 14 curtained rooms called birdcages, for the “working girls” to entertain their clients. We had dinner in another saloon that was originally owned by Big Nose Kate – Doc Holiday’s girlfriend.
We also stopped at Boothill Grave Yard. Many of the epitaphs are hilarious, most indicating whether the deceased had been shot, hanged, killed, murdered, and one that said “Hanged by Mistake.”
March 24: Benson, AZ
We stopped again at Kartchner, but certainly not before 7am, and all the tickets were gone. We drove down to Coronado Memorial National Monument that honors Coronado and his expedition looking for the fabled gold cities in the 1500’s. 
The Pueblo Indians, in an apparent attempt to keep the expedition away from their homelands, led Coronado from southern Arizona over the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico all the way up into Kansas before Coronado figured he was being led on a wild goose chase. The road was a twisting narrow rode and we hiked ½ mile to the top of the park for a panoramic view of Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico.
The weather is still quite cool (50s) and we’re still complaining. We stopped at a Kmart for RV supplies. The unavailable tickets to Kartchner is screwing up our plans – we already paid in advance for two nights in Benson; otherwise, we would have left today.
