On the way home we went through Telluride, Colorado. I’d never been there befoe and I found Telluride to be spectacular. It’s one of those places to go to see movie stars and other beautiful people. It was really old, really colorful, and (probably) really expensive. When I win the lottery I’m going to think about getting me a place there so I can be a beautiful person, too. The third picture is a picture I forgot to put in an earlier post. We stopped in Ouray, CO on the way to Ridgeway so that John could watch a soccer game on his laptop at a coffee shop with Internet. Unfortunately, the game was held during John’s nap time. He said he only missed the half-time show. Yeah, right.

We arrive at Ridgeway. Dan and Emma were not home so we proceed to Montrose, Colorado and stop off at the Colorado Yurt Company where Dan and Emma work. How cool is that? How many people do you know that make yurts? How many people do you know that even know what a yurt is? See the yurt in the first picture? I got the deluxe tour. The second picture is of Dan and Emma’s front yard. See all those peaks in the distance? They have snow on them. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet. Pretty good view, huh? The third picture has me, John, Dan, and Emma in it with other friends. You’ll have to figure out who’s who.

In ABQ my friend John wants to go to Ridgeway, Colorado to see Dan and Emma. Okay, why not? So we head off the Colorado. We stop at Durango to see what’s there. The lady at the visitor center tells us the weather may get bad. We take off. But, we do go through Siverton (picture 2). I thought Silverton was one of those classic mining towns. It did need a little fixing up, though. But maybe that’s the character the local residents want the town to convey. The third picture shows the road to Ridgeway. This picture is for all my friends in Nassau, Bahamas. My friend John said that the weather wouldn’t be a problem. I think he was just saying that to get me to go.

So I’m back in ABQ for a couple of days. The first day I do my very favorite thing to do in ABQ (actually one of my favorite things to do anywhere in the world). I go get a bus pass for ABQ I head downtown to the bus station and get on the #66 bus and ride it up and down Central Avenue for a while. You meet some really thought-provoking people there. The next picture is of me in front of the Albuquerque Art and History Museum. It’s a cool place to go. The next picture is if the lunch I had at Panera Bread. I went for a bike ride with a friend and we ended up at the new Panera Bread shop on Central Avenue. I asked what kind of soup they had and the manager brought me a sampler. I got a Asiago Cheese Bagel and a muffin and I was good-to-go. I want to personally thank the manager publicly. The soups were wonderful. The bean soup could have used just a smidgen more salt.

The point of this picture? The Wall behind me. Ranger Ron said to go to Douglas, AZ, get on G Avenue, and drive south until you come to The Wall. “What’s The Wall?” I asked him. He said “Mexico.” Hmmmmm. So I took a photo of The Wall in Douglas, AZ. It’s hardly the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, or the Great Wall of China, but it’s got to make you stop and think, doesn’t it?

I’d never heard of Bisbee, Arizona before I met Ranger Ron. He told me I should go see the town of Bisbee. He said he had friends in Bisbee and it was a nice place to visit. So, on the way back to his house I decided I would stop off. I was glad I did. Bisbee is one of those quintessentially interesting place that make an impact on a person. It was a significant copper mining community until the copper started running out in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia the “sudden flood of real estate onto the market and crash in housing prices, coupled with an attractive climate and picturesque scenery, led to Bisbee’s subsequent rebirth as an artists’ colony in the early 1970s” and it became a “haven for artists and hippies” during that period. Today, it’s a town worthy of a visit from someone passing through the area. Ron told me I missed a great coffee shop and a couple of good restaurants on my visit. maybe I’ll get back one of these days. Note – ignore my poor pictures and look at the photos at Google Images and Flickr. There are some great pictures of the town.

Tombstone, AZ bills itself as “The Town Too Tough To Die” and maybe that’s so. I decided I had to learn a little more about what the town was all about. I started at the Visitor’s Center where I was given a map of the town and some information on events. Before I go any further let me state that the town is very commercial. If you’re looking for a real Wild West experience you’re about 130 years too late. But, you can get some sense of what the Wild West was like. I got to Main Street a little early. Tombstone is not a morning town. I visited a museum, the Bird Cage Theatre, where I photographed the hearse. I also did the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral show. It was entertaining. I also visited Boot Hill, the cemetery from the old days. The last picture of the group is of a solar trash compactor, the only one I’ve ever seen. If you look closely, you’ll see it’s more than a little full of trash. If I had to sum up Tombstone in one word it would be commercial. But, it really did get me thinking. There is a lot of history in the annals of Tombstone. Tombstone is one of the more interesting places in the history of the Old West. If you take an interest, you’ll find many records of what happened in the town. Tombstone was a very active community and it is said that the mining operations of the area produced as much as  $626 million of revenue in today’s dollars.

Traveling through Arizona I needed to stop occasionally. I went to Kartchner Caverns to look for a campsite. I would have stayed but it was a little too pricey. I found that most state campgrounds were overpriced in California and Arizona at $25-39. I drove a little bit more and found a road leading into a National Forest where camping was free. The price was right, but, unfortunately, there was no toilet or shower. There were also no generators to be heard or screaming kids running past my tent at midnight.

On my way back to Oklahoma I decided to go back and revisit some of the places I missed when I was heading west. When I was in Tuscon earlier in my trip I missed the Titan Missile Museum. I wasn’t going to miss it a second time. The first picture is of the outside if the building. The second is on the tour where the guide explained how a missile would have been fired. She did so quite quickly and I didn’t take notes. It was very complicated. After all, it only meant World War III and the potential end of mankind. The third picture is of one of the ten-story missiles still in the silo. The Titan Missile carried a nuclear warhead that would level a typical large city. The museum is a significant reminder of the Cold War, an event that is best left in the past.

Richard Milhous Nixon was an American politician of the Twentieth Century. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946. He was elected President in 1968 and 1972 and was the only President to resign, which he did in 1974. I went to Nixon’s Library in Yorba Linda, CA to see what he left as a legacy. It was a very unimposing building on the outside but it had some very interesting exhibits, a beautiful garden, and Nixon’s boyhood home with original furnishings. He was born in the home and buried about 200 feet from the home.The pictures are of the front of the library, the birthplace, and the garden. Nixon served at a very significant time in American history and his Watergate involvement was one of the most significant events of the American Presidency.