On our last full day in Tucson we travelled about an hour to the nearby town of Tombstone, Arizona which faithfully maintains its traditional wild West image and history. It’s the location of the O.K. Corral, and used in loads of movies including the film from 1993, ‘Tombstone’ with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer – we’ve not seen it before but we’re going to watch it since it’s set in the town we’ve now seen, and based on real people like Doc Holliday and the Earp family that we heard a lot about while we were there.

Anyway, we went on a 45 minute narrated trolley tour around the town which gave us a chance to hear about the history and see lots of the famous sites. The main town area is very traditional, there’s horse drawn carriages taking people around, everyone seems to be dressed up as cowboys, and they do various gun fight re-enactments in different places around town too. We went to see one in the town theatre which was good fun, they re-enacted some real events from the past and told you more about the town’s history.

There were loads of Western clothing stores which we enjoyed looking around and quite a few traditional saloon bars – so obviously we went for a couple of drinks! There was even some live country music going on which was good, the first live music we’ve seen on this trip.

Travel to Joshua Tree

The next morning we packed up quite early and set off by 9am as we had a long day of travelling to go to our next destination which is Joshua Tree. We stopped briefly at the San Xavier Del Bac Mission church which is just outside Tucson.

We could only have a brief look around the grounds, and poke our heads inside quickly as they had some services and baptisms going on annoyingly. The front of the church was also being renovated and had a lot of scaffolding up, so that was a shame for photos. So I’ve put a few below from Google to show you what it normally looks like.

After that, we pretty much just drove for the rest of the day, arriving in the early evening and gaining an extra hour due to the time zone change. We’ve got 2 days in Joshua Tree and Lucy will post an update probably tomorrow from our days here.

Here’s a few pics from our Airbnb here:

Si