Day 20 & 21, San Antonio

Texas, DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS. First off, who would want to? State color: Brown, state spice: dirt, state bird: Buzzard, state animal: deer, this is just a miserable state, maybe Mexico should have tried harder to keep it. Yuck, I wish I had a dollar for every buzzard I seen.  881 miles so far this trip, El Paso across the state to Beaumont, last year almost as many miles from El Paso across the state on I-20. The speed limit is 80 cause people can't drive fast enough to get out of the state. The buzzards feast all day long on the poor deer that threw themselves infront of vehicles trying end their misery in Texas. The wind is so strong, that's not sunburn you see, it's wind burn. Oh well, Don't Mess With  Texas!

Our next stop was San Antonio to see the Riverwalk and The Alamo.  This is a statue of St. Anthony given to the city from Portugal.

The Alamo, just sitting there, what's left of it right in the middle of the city. It was very beautiful, touching and moving.  These 189 men gave their lives willingly, for a cause they felt was the right thing to do.  Kind of reminds me of 40 other American souls.

Across the street from the Alamo, is the US Post Office and Court House.  It sits right where the north wall of the fort stood. Inside, up along the ceiling are these murals depicting the Battle of The Alamo.

Maybe you can get a feel for where the Alamo sits inside the busy city.

Depiction of the fort. The very small box at the top right is the old church that everyone sees in pictures of the Alamo.  The whole thing took up 3 acres.

This church never had a roof until the US Army put one on in 1850.

Picture of the only building in Texas that is only flying the US flag.  I swear, every building flying the American flag also is flying the Texas State flag next to it.

The Riverwalk is pretty.  But it's just one restaurant after another vieing for business.

That's the Crockett Hotel, it's across the street of the backside of the Alamo.  We headed out of San Antonio Thursday late afternoon. We are spending the night East of Beaumont, right on the state line of Texas and Louisianna.  Friday brings us 250 miles to New Orleans.  Peace, Linda

Day 18 & 19 Tomstone

Ok you yellow belly, Tombstone is one giant tourist trap, but oh, what fun! This is a small theater troup, 4 guys.  They reenact several famous (ok, famous in Tombstone) gunfights and after paying a fee for the privelage of watching, you are asked to tip the guys! This is not where they relive the shootout at the ok corral, that's another place and another fee!

That's me holding a real 6 shooter!

Anyone for a hangin?

Cowboy Dave

Wyatt Earp of course!

Doc Holliday, just before the shootout

Bad guys on the right

Ok, here's the shootout at the ok corral.  October 26, 1881. The lawmen:  Wyatt Earp, age 33, unhurt in Gunfight. died of old age in 1929. Doc Holliday, age 30. Hip grazed by bullet.  died of TB in 1887. Virgil Earp, age 38. Leg wound. Ambushed Dec 28, 1881. Died of pneumonia in 1905. Morgan Earp, age 30. Shot through upper body.  Murdered March 18, 1882

The Cowboys:  Frank McLaury, age 33, killed in gunfight. Tom Mclaury, 28, killed in gunfight. Billy Clanton, age 19, killed in gunfight. Ike Clanton, 34. Ran at start of gunfight. Killed by Detective Brighton in 1887.

It is now just after 2, can you see the start of the rain? We are now 4 for 4 days with rain on and off. At this particular point, we are sitting on metal bleachers!

This is in town.  This is the history of Tombstone.  A man came out to prospect.  Further south and west of Tomstone, he went to a fort manned by the Army.  He told them he wanted to prospect in the area where Tombstone now stands and they told him that all he would find up there was his tombstone cause of the Indians. The Apache lived up in the area, Cochise and Geronimo.  He went anyway, lived to tell about it. He found an 8 inch wide, 12 foot long vein full of silver. When he filed his claim, he named it Tombstone.  Word spread and as expected, people flooded the area. For many years, the town was called Turkey Creek or something like that. The name was officially changed to Tombstone in the early 1900s.  At one point, there were 106 bars on the main street.  All over the tourist street, there are characters "acting" their parts, trying to get you to follow them to their act, where there of course is a charge to get in. There still is a few very nice bar/restaurants on the street and Dave and I had ourselves a few to many beers and weren't fixing to leave so we stayed another night in Tombstone!

Tuesday led us on a journey to this place.  We left Tombstone, heading south and east. We traveled over a 100 miles following the directions we got from the man in Tombstone that sold me my cowgirl boots. After a 4 mile drive down a rutty dusty dirt road, we stopped at the ranch of Jerry Sanders.  He came out to the gate wearing his cowboy hat. He said he was 74 yrs old and was the 4th generation Sanders to live on this ranch. He currently lived alone, has 2 cats and 3 peacocks, down from 10. He has recently come eye to eye with a "lion" as he called it, a mountain lion to us Easterners. He has black bear, bobcats, fox, eagles, hawks and all kinds of wildlife all around. He lives on the edge of the Chiracahua Mt range and this past May, there was a wildfire up there that came all the way down to his property before being put out. It burned many acres and the wildlife has had to come down to find food. What you are looking at is the path to the grave of Johnny Ringo.  He's the outlaw in the movie that Doc Holliday supposedly shot and killed.  Remember, Wyatt Earp was supposed to go to a showdown with Ringo and Doc, who had been layed up inside a rancher's house with his TB acting up went instead and shot Ringo dead.  Well, according to Mr. Sanders, that never happened. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp were already in Colorado.

Mr. Sanders told us that he gets about 2,000 visitors a year to his place, he said mostly Europeans, they just love the Western cowboy and Indian stuff.

The road to Mr. Sanders' ranch

This is hard to read, but in a nutshell, it says that John Ringo as found propped up against a tree with a bullet to the temple.  It was declared a suicide, but later changed to a murder.  Mr. Sanders said that because it was July and he had been dead 2 or 3 days, they just buried him there.

We stopped here, expecting to see the monument, but the same fire went through this park and they lost the guard rail up in the mountains and we couldn't go up.

A black and white picture of a burned tree.  By the way, before going to the ranger station, we both saw a pile of poop.  It was saucer plate large, just a plop and full of seeds.  I told Dave that my guess was bear, he dissagreed but didn't have a guess.  Yep, it was bear poop. So bears do sh*%^&t in the woods.  The ranger said it was bear and that there was a sow with at least one cub. They along with a few mountain lions have moved down from the burned out mountains. Well, tomorrow morning (Wednesday) we are on the move to San Antonio and the Alamo!  Tonight's stop is El Paso and again, we had rain. Take care everyone, miss you all, Linda

Day 17 Tucson

What a wild ride this has been!  I took a picture of the map in the USA today. I marked out our ride so far. 4300 miles to date.  Today was a ride day. We stopped in Show Low AZ to watch the Buffalo Bills put on a bad performance and lose to the Bengals. Yuck. We left there and were promptly met my rain AGAIN.  Three days in a row. This was the worst rain we had. It was strong and steady for quite awhile.

The rain would come and then we would either drive out of it or it would let up.  then the sun would come out. You could see where the rain was all day.  I heard on the news that it is the remnants of Hurricane Hilary. We traveled all day in mountains. Our elevations was always over 5,000 feet.

These tallest cactus in the US are in Saguaro National Forest. There were thousands of them. They were mixed in with lots of Joshua Trees.  Speaking of Joshua trees, a few days ago, I blogged that the trees in one of my pictures were Joshua Trees.  Well, they weren't.  They were Junipers.

We have ended our night at Tombstone, AZ. In the morning, we will head into town for a gunfight at the OK corral. I don't know where it will be to after that, just that we will be heading into New Mexico, making our way back East.  Hugs, Linda

Day 16 Petrified Forest National Park

In honor of some of our best friends, we would like to start the day with a stop on Route 66 at the Iron Horse Saloon.  Hank and Arnie are charter Iron Horse Cowboys and I am proud to say that I have finally acheived status as an Iron Horse Cowgirl. Anyway, in Williams AZ, here was the Iron Horse Saloon!

We are doing the Hank thumbs up!

Our first stop of the day was the Meteor Crater East of Flagstaff off of I-40.  Hurtling to earth at about 26,000 miles per hour, a meteorite slammed into the flat plain.  First, a meteoroid travels through space. When it enters the earth's atmosphere, it is called a meteor and when and if it crashes to earth, it is called a meteorite. Anyway, this one was estimated to be about 150ft across and weighing several hundred thousand tons struck the plain you see in this picture with an explosive force greater than 20 million tons of TNT. By the way, this picture is taken through an open hole in the wall.  In less than a few seconds, a crater 700ft deep and over 4000ft across was carved.

In the bottom of this crater, you could put 20 football fields and then 2,000,000 people inside. It isn't the largest or oldest (it's only estimated to be 50,000 years old) in the US, but it is the best preserved and the first proven meteorite impact site on the planet!

In the US, there are about 27 meteor craters. The largest one in the world is in Africa.

This crater has been owned by the same family for over  100 yrs. They operate this center and it has been and is still used by scientists to study meteors. In 1968, Meteor Crater was designated a Natural Landmark by the Department of the Interior.  NASA has used this crater from 1964 until 1972 to simulate lunar moon craters for our astronauts.  All the astronauts that walked on the moon trained here.  At an impact site, the cratering process ejects material that originates below the surface of the crater. When our astronauts went to the moon, they knew they should be able to collect material on ejecta blankets that originated  beneath the cratered region. this technique was solely learned at meteor crater.

Just a picture of a root cellar that I thought was neat.

An inhabitant of the desert

A pretty flower of the desert

Winslow Arizona, Route 66! 

Now I always knew that the Eagles made this corner in Winslow AZ famous with their song, "Take It Easy", but I never knew the real story behind the song until now.  Seems that Jackson Browne was driving Route 66 and he broke down at the corner in the picture above this one. He was standing beside his car when a girl driving a flat bed Ford slowed down to take a look at him.  Later, while collaborating with his good friend, Glen Frye, they wrote Take It Easy.

We arrived in Winslow in time for a closed street car show.  Of course this one was Dave's favorite!

Next stop was Petrified Forest.

These logs were so cool.  Once, this area was a floodplain. Conifer trees stood along the banks of the streams. Crocodile like reptiles, giant amphibians and small dinosaurs lived here. Over time, the trees fell over and were covered by silt, mud, and volcanic ash.  This stuff cut off oxygen and slowed the logs' decay. Silica laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually, the silica crystalized into quartz and the logs were petrified. Over time, (try 225 million years since the trees lived) wind and water (the ranger told us that it is not unusual for winds to be recorded at 70-100mph) wore away the rock layers and exposed fossilized ancient plants and animals and this wood.

See the petrified wood at the bottom

This is a very cool park.

We next made our way to the Painted Desert. It was just about dusk, so the coloring wasn't the best, but I must say, it still was awesome to see the different colors.

Painted Desert

Nightfall at Painted Desert.

This should have been at the top, oh well!  Anyway, while we were at the Meteor Crater, it started to rain.  Not hard, but it was two days in a row for us.  We were told that at the crater, they get 7" of precip a year and that includes snow, so they asked us to come back as they can always use rain! Arizona is a free range state for the cattle by the way, they just roam wherever they want. Well, we aren't sure where we are heading tomorrow, probably towards Tuscon to catch the Bills game and then onto Tombstone. Remember this, raising children is like getting pecked to death by chickens!  Peace and love to all, Dave and Linda