Tombstone, AZ: Thursday, March 11th

We were camping about an hour north of Tombstone so it seemed silly not to go and visit for a couple of hours at least. Once Dave had finished work, we drove through a couple of small towns and past many, many RV parks, Arizona is certainly the major destination of northerners/snowbirds.

As we entered Tombstone, we passed Boothill Cemetery, where the remains of three of Wyatt Earp’s fighting companions are buried. The kids have been on a Scooby Doo kick lately and Boothill Cemetery was mentioned in one of the recent episodes so they were excited to see that.

I’d checked online and located a saloon we could have dinner in. I know that bringing kids to Big Nose Kate’s Saloon was maybe not the ideal dinner location but it had such cool history that we overlooked that! They were not the only children there and kid’s options were listed on the menu so we were alright.

We (Dave and I) enjoyed learning about Big Nose Kate. She was apparently one of the first ‘working girls’ in Tombstone, mostly inhabited by miners. Her claim to fame was that she was the girlfriend of Doc Holliday. One of the Wyatt Earp movies was playing on the TV, we were kind of hoping that the kids didn’t understand everything going on, some of the content wasn’t necessarily child-friendly!

I had a ‘Big Nose Kate’ to drink – I felt I should! It contained shots of rum, tequila, vodka and gin, along with orange and cranberry juices – all of this in a pint glass, which I got to keep for an extra $2! We felt that the kids’ drinks were a total rip-off, each small plastic cup of milk was $2 – we didn’t realize until the bill came, of course, our milk-lovers all had two each, so $16 of milk later, we finished our dinner – I could’ve brought over 4 gallons for that price! Dave was highly unimpressed.

We were entertained by a wild-west musician during dinner (one of his lines: “Don’t forget the barmaids, when you’ve finished looking at their tits, don’t forget the tips!”), the waitresses were all dressed up in true wild-west ‘girl in saloon’ style – a lot of corsets and as we were finishing up with our meal, a suited gun-slinger came meandering in. Of course, the area is a huge tourist trap but is well-done, you feel as though you’re right in the middle of a wild-west movie and a cowboy could come riding down the street at any time. It was a fun evening, don’t need to do it again: check!