April 14th

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April 14th 2004

While Erika was at school for the day we took A.J. and Kathy on a drive to check out some of the local ghost towns. There are quite a few old abandoned mining towns in the area with a few neat structures still left standing here and there among all of the foundations.

	The drive through the high desert mountains here is always beautiful. There are a lot of cool looking rock formations just about everywhere you look. It's hard to take photos of it all - the pictures just don't translate the size and distance of things.
	Emily got pretty tired out on the drive... We ended up in the town of Tombstone toward the end of our journey. We couldn't explore too long since we had to get back home to meet Erika after school.
	This is the best of Tombstone. The buildings are all very neat and the atmosphere is nice when it's not all jammed with tourists. The town of Tombstone itself is kind of cool, but everything has been commercialized and is geared toward tourists. You can't walk around without being reminded at least 5 times that there are gunfights every few hours. It all costs money of course, so we've skipped that part all together.
	Becky took this picture at one of many of the local ice cream shops. It made Becky and I laugh out loud. Everything in Tombstone seems to have some famous historical significance if you believe all of the little signs on every shop. It was nice to see someone poking a little fun at it all...
	Almost all of the historical buildings in town have been converted into a shop of some kind. Most of the shops are geared toward the tourists that travel through. You can find half a dozen restaurants, and as many "taverns", a couple of places where you can dress up as a cowboy or "lady of the evening" and get your picture taken or just rent an "authentic" cowboy outfit for the day. Why someone would want to pretend to be a cowboy there is beyond me... You'd look like the local hired help. In a nutshell, it's hard to enjoy the historical aspects of the town with all of the locals trying to pull off some kind of Disney like atmosphere. Enough said...