We Visit The Town Too Tough To Die

Most summers, I take the girls on at least one day-trip out of town. Usually, we head up to the Phoenix area and have a lot of adventures up there. This year was to be a little different, seeing as how Nathan and I both had short out-of-state trips scheduled in the month of July. Those trips, combined with Lorelai's thriving pet-sitting business, meant our time was a little hectic. Ultimately, Nathan got to take the girls to Phoenix instead of me, mostly because my solo trip (to Comic-Con...more on that soon!) fell in late July, just before the beginning of school.

While I agreed with the plan on a scheduling level, I felt a bit left out. I was going to miss taking the kids up to Phoenix! Over the last few summers, it has sort of become our "thing." So naturally, I looked around to see if there was another place the girls and I could visit together. This spring, Lorelai became really interested in the Old West, due to a unit in her social studies class on the westward expansion of the United States. As a result, I started thinking that maybe this would be the year I took the kids to Tombstone, Arizona...aka, The Town Too Tough To Die.

Technically, Lorelai had been to Tombstone once before...she was still curled up in my stomach at the time! Nathan and I spent a fun weekend in Bisbee, Arizona, when I was pregnant with Lorelai; while on the way home, we decided to take a short detour and spent a few hours in Tombstone. Honestly, we were underwhelmed. Tombstone is a town with a colorful, rich history, but it is also a city that has transformed that legacy into a chintzy, often tacky revenue stream. Everything was very commercialized, overpriced, and inauthentic. The town had some bright spots, but overall we felt it was a sad city, crumbling around the edges while doggedly trying to preserve its "historical" facade for a casual public.

Although Nathan and I were unimpressed, we both thought that someday, the kids might want to see Tombstone and get a little taste of the "Old West" (however tacky that might be). This year, with Lorelai's interest piqued, I thought it might be time to revisit Tombstone, with the kids in tow. I suspected they would love the cheesy, "movie studio/theme park" feel of the town's historical district. We chose the day of our visit as July 6, 2016. Nathan was out of town on his trip that day (he went up to Colorado that week, to visit with his sister for a few days as she graduated the local Firefighter Academy). He promised us he wouldn't feel left out if we traveled to Tombstone without him, so off we went!

Tombstone was only about an hour and a half drive from our house. Since this was early July, I was a little worried about the weather. However, getting away from Tucson actually lowered  the temperature; it was overcast and relatively cool all day (it only got to the low 90s; very unusual for July in southern Arizona). We even got sprinkled with a little rain, and it felt wonderful!

Right after getting there, the girls stretched their legs (and found some swings) in a local park...

Not long after, we bought our tickets to the OK Corral Gunfight Site. It was one of the town's more expensive attractions, but also one of the most historically significant. Nathan and I had refused to fork over the money last time we visited, so I splurged this year for myself and the girls. As it turned out, it was a moderately interesting visit.

 

 

First of all, we were treated to a multimedia presentation featuring a large, rotating diorama, as well as an old movie (narrated by Vincent Price!) that described in some detail the history of the region. It was a little dated, but still interesting (well, interesting to me...the girls got a bit squirmy watching it).

 

Elsewhere at the site, there were quite a bit of period clothing, weapons, transportation, tools, household items, and other curiosities on display at the gunfight location. It wasn't a huge museum, but it did a good job of representing the time period and revealing more information about the history of the town.

The "corral" has mostly been overtaken by a series of small buildings, each containing different items of historical interest. One building was now a gallery of old photos taken of the region.

 

Another building was a recreation of a "crib," which was a tiny hut used by prostitutes. They would rent out the crib, then use it to host their clientele. It was an interesting exhibit, but also a little sad.

There was also a long line of old carriages and stagecoaches. At the end of this line was a functioning blacksmith's shop. Sadly the blacksmith wasn't around the day we visited; however, he had created a lot of hand-beaten iron sculptures, which were displayed for sale.

After we had spent a while looking around, it was time to go catch the gun show!

The actual "battle" at the OK Corral lasted less than a minute, but it was bloody and deadly. The "gunfight" portion of the show took place at the very end; for the first several minutes, several actors (portraying the Earps, Clantons, Doc Holliday, etc.) spent lots of time talking a lot of smack to each other and generally acting threatening. The play depicted a very condensed version of the feud between the Clantons and the Earps, which simmered for weeks before erupting into a shower of bullets.

 

The girls were getting a bit restless during the "talky" portion of the gun show; that made it all the more amusing when the shots began to fire. They were pretty shocked and caught off guard when it happened! One of the actors took a minute at the end of the show to reveal the ultimate fates of all the men involved in the notorious gunfight.

Overall, the gunfight site was a little more informative and engaging than I had feared. It didn't excuse the rest of the town for being so tacky, but at least they put some effort into this particular historical site to make it a worthwhile place to visit.

After sitting out in the hot sun for a while watching the gunfight, the kids were pretty hot and hungry. We decided to eat lunch at the Golden Eagle Brewery, one of the town's older restaurants.

 

The food wasn't anything to write home about (it was maybe a step or two above fast food), but the interior decor was pretty cool...

I don't drink alcohol, but I would have loved to have a seat at the gorgeous bar!

There were also some cool dead-animal heads adorning the walls.

 

My favorite part of eating at this restaurant was seeing all the actors from the gun show we'd just watched, coming in to order their lunch. It was amusing and anachronistic to pass by them at their table and see them texting on their smartphones, while still in full Old West costume! I guess you had to be there, but we all found it funny.

 

After lunch, we spent a lot of the afternoon wandering the "main drag" of the historical district. That meant a lot of window shopping, and a lot of photographs of other historical buildings, like the Bird Cage Theater (which we did not visit).

There were a lot of "haunted/ghost tour" attractions in town, many more so than at my last visit. I suspect this is Tombstone's way of trying to keep up with the times & hop on the "ghost-hunters" trend, in order to stay fresh & appealing to tourists.

We didn't go inside every store, but we did check out many of them. The girls had each brought some of their allowance money, to buy themselves a souvenir or two. Some of them (Celeste!! But not naming name), were a little more indecisive than others. This meant we spent a lot of time wandering from store to store, before finally deciding on something to get.

 

 

The grossly overpriced nature of all these souvenir shops made finding fun, cheap, kid-friendly keepsakes a little harder than we'd expected.

 

 In between all the shopping, we found time to visit a couple of other, more "historical" places in town. The Tombstone Epitaph is the local newspaper, and it's been running all the news that's fit to print for more than one hundred years! Best of all, they have a tiny "museum" filled with old printing presses, and it doesn't cost anything to view them and learn a thing or two about the history of printing.

 

 

Plus they sold cool T-shirts (we managed to resist buying it, though). As you can imagine, the movie Tombstone is kind of a big deal in Tombstone; pretty much every store I visited had a television that was playing it! There were also movie posters everywhere for Tombstone, as well as other Old West movies that took place in the area.

We also checked out the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park. Nathan and I had visited this old, stately building on our last visit, and were fairly impressed. Even more than the OK Corral site, the courthouse had a lot of detailed, in-depth exhibits featuring historical artifacts and facts about Tombstone's colorful inhabitants over the years. It also has a lot of documents from the period detailing the OK Corral fight, and seeing how they matched up with the information from the gunfight site was interesting.

 

Of course, the kids loved seeing the courthouse recreated, and loved snooping around inside the old bank vault.

But their favorite part was the gallows out in the back. Yikes!

We had one more stop to make before heading back home. Even though I've complained about the tackiness of Tombstone, there was one thing I really wanted to do before leaving...

...get a tacky Old West-style photograph of myself and the girls! Deep down in my cynical heart, I have always wanted to take one of these silly pictures. I am so glad the girls were good sports about it. It was kind of a long wait to get the photo, but I think it was worth it. Plus, the girls looked totally adorable! (They were a little disappointed that their beautifully colored dresses didn't look as nice in the sepia-toned photo, but we were aiming for authenticity, you know??) We scanned the photo to keep on the computer, then Nathan proudly took it to work when he returned from Colorado, where it adorns one of his shelves.

On the way out of town, we made a short visit to Boot Hill Graveyard, the final resting place of the notorious Billy Clanton and the McClaury boys, the unlucky victims of the Earp's pistols at the OK Corral fight...

There are also several gravestones with some pretty humorous epitaphs.

In the end, each girl was pretty happy with their souvenirs. Lorelai bought a coonskin cap; she was overjoyed to have found one. She'd read a lot about Davy Crockett in school this last spring, and even though this cap had a large "TOMBSTONE" patch on it, she still wore it with pride. Celeste, who had initially wanted a small cap gun but was unable to afford one, finally settled on a rubber-band wooden pistol. She had a lot of fun shooting us all with it over the next several days. Aurora found a pair of cheap handcuffs, which delighted her to no end. One of her career aspirations is to be a police officer, and she reasoned that she needs some cuffs in order to prepare her for that job. To this day, she has been using the cuffs on herself, her sisters, and every friend that lets her! She is taking her future job very seriously.

The girls were a little tired after our day, but they really enjoyed Tombstone. As for myself, I thought it was a better visit than my previous one. Perhaps it was better to see the town through the eyes of some excited kids, rather than my own jaded gaze. I am glad we visited the OK Corral site, and also the Courthouse. For those interested in "authentic" history, those are the two best places in town to visit. I did think our visit dragged a bit; I was not nearly as interested in shopping for souvenirs as my girls! However, if you have older kids like mine, I do think Tombstone is worth a few hours of your time. Its glory days may be behind it, but it still has some enjoyable diversions.

Lorelai's Pets Plus Plants Paradise (Her Words)

Our summer vacation this year was light on the "big" (out-of-state trips, etc.) but heavy on the "little things"...day trips, sports clubs, pool time, play dates with friends. Nathan and I were each able to take a few-days' trip away from Arizona (more on that in a later post), but the girls were "stuck" in Sahuarita for the summer. Thankfully, the girls have borne this in good spirits, and have managed to have fun despite the sometimes monotonous days and unrelentingly hot weather.

Lorelai did more than just have fun, though...she started up a successful business! She is getting to that age where she's not quite old enough to baby-sit for other families, but definitely old enough to want additional challenges & responsibilities. She also wanted to find a way to earn some extra money while doing something she loved. With a little guidance from Nathan and myself, she ended up doing a lot of pet-sitting/house-sitting this summer.

When she first started formulating her idea, Lorelai told me she wanted to do a "dog-walking" business. Lorelai loves dogs, and she (along with her sisters) has been anxiously waiting for our family to get one (*just a few more months, girls, I promise!*). Anyway, Lorelai thought a dog-walking business would help her get some valuable experience in working with dogs, which would both earn her some money and prepare her for our own dog, whenever it should arrive.

Nathan and I liked the dog-walking idea, but didn't think the concept would net her a ton of business...particularly in the hot hot summer. I explained to Lorelai that in the summer, lots of families need pet-sitters, because they are often traveling out of town and can't take their animals with them. The same was true of plants and gardens...vacationers needed help watering and tending their crops. So, with a little persuasion, we convinced Lorelai to market her services as an all-purpose pet/house-sitter. She was not as thrilled to be taking care of plants as she was of dogs; on the other hand, though, the thought of keeping dogs at our home overnight was very appealing to her.

Lorelai named her business "Lorelai's Pets Plus Plants Paradise" (or "LPPP," for short. No, I don't know what happened to the fourth "P"). We didn't print business cards or anything, but as it turned out, a little advertising on Facebook (and among our friends) ended up going a long way. We had one or two families express interest immediately, and we kept adding jobs throughout the summer. For the entire month of July, Lorelai always had at least one or two tasks to fulfill every day...whether it was walking a dog staying at our house, feeding a cat at another house, watering the outside plants at yet another house...she did it all!

 

Here's a rundown of all Lorelai's "clients" for the year:

 

--Maz, a spunky Labrador mix. We watched her on two separate weekends, and fell in love with her right away. She wasn't even a year old yet, so she was very active and rowdy, which was totally fun but also wore us out a bit!

 

--Skippy and Tesa, two adorable miniature Schnauzers. Each dog belongs to a different family (both friends of ours); however, both families were to be out of town for the Fourth of July, so they called on us for help!

Despite their similar appearance, their temperaments were quite different; Tesa was more high-strung and "needy" (she often hogged the cuddles!), while Skippy was quieter and more reserved. But it was still fun having both dogs over; it gave the girls more furry friends to hug.

 

 

--Mufasa and Lady, a Yorkie and a Spaniel mix, respectively. They are both the pets of a family in our LDS ward. They left town for over a week, so these two adorable little dogs were our houseguests for eight days (I missed some of that time myself, as I was in San Diego when they arrived; Nathan ended up helping Lorelai with most of their care).

Lady was a very shy, sensitive dog, but she ended up worshipping Lorelai (likely because Lorelai was literally "the hand that fed her"); Mufasa, however, was an outgoing, charming fellow, and everyone in the family fell in love with him (and so did many of our visitors that week!).

 

 

--Annabeth, the goat! This was definitely our most interesting pet-sitting experience of the summer. A family in our ward, who owns a large chunk of land, has raised several goats over the years. As of this summer, they were down to Annabeth and her two kids, Isaiah and Ava.

They also kept several chickens, and had a few feral cats slinking around. And they had a pet turtle and a large garden as well! We were responsible for stopping by the homestead at least once a day, sometimes twice (we split the duties with the Sparks family, but on some days we needed to do both shifts).

 

Every morning at this home, we had to feed the cats, feed the turtle, feed the chickens, and feed the goats, we also had to milk Annabeth!

This experience proved to me, maybe once and for all, that I am not the "farmer's daughter" my father probably wishes I was. Milking was a very stressful, traumatic experience for me; I spilled a lot of the milk, and wasn't able to get much out of poor Annabeth before she lost patience with me and started tapping her hooves all around, trying to knock the pail over and terrorize the lot of us. It took Lorelai and I a few days before we figured out the "rhythm" to milking, and we did get better at it over time. Lorelai proved herself a much better milker than myself; I think she improved daily and might have made a pretty good milker if we were to take on the job full-time. However, since we only milked her a handful of times, we never really got enough milk out of Annabeth to do much with. And the girls didn't much like the taste of the milk, either.

 However, in spite of our semi-incompetence, there was something very fulfilling about taking milk home that we had milked ourselves. We sterilized it and then used it in a few recipes (I made pancakes out of it on one occasion, for instance). Besides the milk, we were also able to take home whatever eggs the hens had laid that day. We didn't need to buy eggs for a while! And we were also free to pick any fresh fruits or vegetables the garden produced while we were caring for everything else. We got several delicious cucumbers and a juicy cantaloupe for our troubles! Working at this home was definitely more involved and exhausting than most of our other assignments, but it was possibly the most rewarding as well.

These were probably the most "involved" of Lorelai's job assignments this summer. But she had a lot of other jobs, too (many of which didn't get pictures, so I'm going to list them below):

--She fed two ferrets, the pets of more family friends. The ferrets stayed at their own home, so Lorelai dropped by daily for a few days to check on them and play with them a little bit. There was also a fish there that was fed daily.
--We also fed the cat of still another family friend for a week while they were away. Zariah was a very shy cat who we rarely saw, but she always cleaned off her plate after we left! There was another fish at this home to feed, too.
--Mufasa and Lady had a cat "brother" named Boots, who remained back at the family home. Lorelai had to visit the home every day to feed the cat and change his litter box; she also had to water all the plants in the family's backyard...and it was a pretty lush, elaborate garden.
--Lorelai also watered the outdoor plants of two different family friends; one family was away for about ten days, and another for close to three weeks!

The plant-watering jobs ended up being more involved then we'd originally assumed, due to the unusual weather. This has been a particularly hot summer, with very little relief. You're probably thinking, "Adrianne, you complain about the heat every year!", but this year has been particularly rough (really!). Our monsoon (rainy) season has been very erratic and much drier than usual; the rains that usually cool things off in July/August have simply never materialized (with the exception of three or four especially stormy days). The result has been day after day after day of blistering high temperatures with very little relief. Those plants definitely needed Lorelai's tender loving care.

Since many of the homes we visited were a good distance from our own, I spent quite a bit of time driving Lorelai around to fulfill her duties. This sometimes got a little hectic and exhausting, but it was also invigorating in a way...I was helping my daughter with her job! As you can imagine, the Fourth of July weekend was Lorelai's busiest weekend of the year, due to so many families traveling out of town at that time. We had three or four different visits to make each day that weekend, and on top of celebrating the holiday, it got pretty exhausting!

 

 

At least we found time to have a big barbecue dinner with our friends the Tonks (they're a family who moved into the area a little more than a year ago), and catch Sahuarita's fireworks show that night...as well as setting off some of our own!

 

Throughout all our driving/walking from house to house, Lorelai remained professional and eager to work (she may have grumbled once or twice during our early-morning days, but she did all the actual work without complaint). I was so impressed to see what a responsible girl she was becoming. She was especially happy working with all the dogs (no big surprise there); she loved taking them on walks and usually insisted on doing that herself, without her sisters' help. She quickly developed a good rapport with each dog, winning their trust and also their affection. This was true even of our most shy critters; they loved her!

Her last pet-sitting job actually overlapped somewhat with the beginning of school; by then she was very grateful for the work to be winding down (she had SIXTH grade to think about at this point, after all). However, she was grateful for the many opportunities she had to work and earn some extra cash. We tried to keep Lorelai's work rate at a reasonable limit; however, some families ended up offering her way more than we had ever planned on asking for! When all her summer earnings were totaled up, she ended up with more than $350! Not bad for a ten-year-old kid.

So what did Lorelai do with her hard-earned dough? Paid tithing on it immediately. And then she put half of it in her savings account, because she wanted to "save some for college." I was impressed and touched by her mature, responsible way of managing her finances.She also set a good example for her younger sisters, who have also started talking about "jobs" they want to do in the future, as well as things they'd like to save up money for.

 I know Lorelai's edging ever closer to that magical birthday number 12 (she'll be able to babysit! Yay!), but I think she went a long way to developing a proper work ethic this summer. I am so grateful to have such an awesome girl for a daughter, and I can't wait to see her, and her sisters, find great opportunities like this in future summers.