Bisbee, AZ and Tombstone, AZ...and a bonus Ghost Town!

 While out in Arizona, we were encouraged to add Bisbee to our lists of must sees. Having never heard of this place, we were really apprehensive. We were planning to go to Tombstone, but added Bisbee to our itinerary as well. We drove outside of Tucson, past Tombstone, and up through some mountains. Before we knew it, we literally stumbled across this little town called Bisbee, which looks so much like San Francisco! Bisbee was an old mining town and a bunch of wealthy San Francisco locals developed the place, hence, it looks a lot like SF. It was full of VERY interesting characters...lots of hippees and other odd people. While most of the town was clean and quaint, there were some strange...parks?! and odd buildings inhabited by some of these people I would suspect were living off the grid. We also noticed tons and tons of stairways everywhere. The town is quite hilly, so to connect from street to street you can climb these stairwells. The town had so much character, tons of great restaurants, and lots of little haunted hotels! The next time we go out there we plan to get a hotel room for a night. We were really pleasantly surprised at this little gem of a town.

 After heading out of Bisbee, we stopped in Tombstone. I had been there years ago and it was similar to how I remembered....commercialized and filled with tourists. BUT...it obviously has history, and there were some cool places to visit. We had a beer in a bar with live gun shots and a man playing piano...it was not boring.

 We made one last stop before heading back to Tucson in Fairbank which was REALLY a ghost town...completely abandoned in the late 1970's...but really most of the town left in the 40's after the mining boom. The town was SO creepy and Aaron made me walk about a mile out this dirt road to a cemetery...I almost had a heart attack I was so scared!

 This was a gas station that was in operation through the 70's if you can believe it!

 This was the school which was recently refurbished and is used as a little museum and book store.

 This is the SPOOKY trail that lead to the cemetery....

 The sun was starting to set.... so CREEPY...

 These are some of the graves. I don't know how appropriate it is to take photos of a cemetery, but I wanted to capture how darned scared I was. The whole thing was really run down but you could definitely tell there were graves everywhere.

 The walk back through the trail was even spookier than the way over because we were fighting the sunset! Ah! I get the willies just looking at these pictures.

All in all a great day discovering some of the old west. What an interesting place!