DAY 28 TOMBSTONE
I forgot to mention that we figured out the source of our time zone problem. Apparently Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time, so half of the year they are 2 hours behind Central Time. So I was not going crazy. Our plans to not reset ourselves to Pacific time were basically scrapped since we have been in Arizona nearly two weeks and ended up having to get on their time after all. Now when we drive into New Mexico we will be on Mountain Time, and then I think we will change to Central Time again in Texas. Ugh.
The weather has been great overall on this trip, so I really shouldn’t complain … but … it seems like every time I resign myself to a change in weather and rotate the kids’ clothes (shorts and Tshirts to the front for Arizona, for example) it backfires. The high tomorrow is only 72. Which is nice, but that means most of the day will be in the 60s, which is pants and longsleeves weather. Last time we did laundry, I put all the cold weather clothes at the back of the drawers, figuring it would be warm until we got back up toward Nashville. We are only an hour or so from Mexico right now, and still we are having to dig out Nora’s jeans.
I highly recommend March of the Penguins, by the way. We put it on again this morning because Nora wanted to see the “animals on the TV” and it was just as good the second time. The complexity of the instincts needed to keep the penguins and their offspring alive is astonishing. A similar instinct toward inevitable development is at work in Michael. Right now he is pushing up on his elbows and looking around. (I suspect if he had enough room, he’d be rolling over.) He has also found his fingers to munch on, although I imagine that has more to do with us losing his pacifier than with his development. I don’t know how we lost it, as he seldom uses it and we always put it back in his bassinet. Oh well. We were going to throw it out when we got home anyway, because it’s kind of a crutch. (For us, not him.)
Day Two in Tombstone has been great. We had a leisurely morning, waiting to leave the camper until Nora had her morning poop and Michael had “second snacks.” We purchased a hodgepodge of tickets to various sights here. The reenactment of the Shootout at OK Corral is not appropriate for children, so we bought one ticket for that and two for the history film and museum. (I had already seen some sort of reenactment in the street when I visited Tombstone with my parents 10 years ago.) So we wandered around town this morning, returned our movie and bought a rug we had our eye on. We stopped in the Bird Cage Theater to see the bullet holes in the wall and such. There was more to see, but it cost $8 each, so we took a pass. Then we came back and had lunch in the camper. Nora went down for her nap and I took a turn going to see the film. I also toured the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper. I had not known that the founder of that paper had first founded the Tucson Citizen, where I worked as an intern in 1997. They had samples of the old fixed type, poured in lead. Then I came back to the campsite and David went to go see the reenactment.
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We went back to Allen Street before dinner, hitting all the shops and landmarks we hadn’t gotten to yet. David made kabobs on the grill and we ate outside. We had some wine in our new wine “glasses,” too. It was a nice night. We also rented the Director’s Cut of Tombstone on DVD. It wasn’t too much different than the original movie, but there were a few scenes left out of the original movie that cleared up some questions I had. It’s interesting that the movie takes the side of the Earps, but here in the town there must still be descendants of both sides because all the portrayals here are quite careful to point out the good points about the Cowboys and the bad points about the Earps, too. After seeing the historical accounts in town, it’s nice to see that the movie was careful to get thing right, including the positions where each man stood during the shootout at the OK Corral. It was interesting to actually walk around on the ground where these things really happened. One shop was selling cowboy hats on the pool table (probably not the same table) where Morgan Earp was shooting pool when he was shot and killed.