Alphecca

Traveling to the Old West

In today's Sunday Mirror (UK) there's a travel piece encouraging British tourists to visit the old west. The writer had a very good time:

THE gunslinger who stepped out from behind the saloon was dressed entirely in black: a stetson casting a shadow across his face, his long frock coat flapping back just enough to reveal a shiny six-gun strapped into his holster.

Three more grim figures followed him into the baking heat of the deserted street to come face to face with a band of evil outlaws.

Gunfire rattled out as each side opened fire, and when the gunsmoke cleared, the dead and the dying were strewn across the dust.

We all clapped and cheered as the actors re-enacting the most famous cowboy shoot-out of all time, The Gunfight at the OK Corral, stood up, brushed themselves down and took a bow. But back in 1881 on this very spot in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona, when Wyatt Earp and brothers Virgil and Morgan, with their ally Doc Holliday, took on the Clantons and the McLaurys, there was real blood on the sidewalk.

You can almost hear the ghostly jangle of spurs. The Town Too Tough to Die was the real thing - a goldrush town which sprang up in the middle of nowhere, making it a magnet for thieves, murderers, hustlers and prostitutes - and our first stop on a driving tour of Arizona in search of cowboys 'n' Injuns.

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We drove to Tucson, a couple of hours away. Our first stop was the Tanque Verde Ranch at the foot of the Rincon Mountains where guests stay in superbly furnished individual log "casitas". Think The Waltons after they'd won the lottery.

Here even complete beginners can learn to ride Western-style, take a pony trek at sun-up into the scrubby mountains to eat biscuits and gravy (a kind of scone served in a savoury sauce) at a cook-out, or simply sit on the porch and listen to the crickets chirp long into the night.

After a two-day stay we headed off to another big draw for cowboy fans - The Old Tucson Studios. Hundreds of movies have been made here: Gunfight at the OK Corral, Eldorado, Tombstone, Will Smith's Wild, Wild West.

Then there were the classic TV shows like The High Chaparral, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Rawhide and even Little House on the Prairie. They are still making movies and TV series here today.

This sounds like the type of itinerary anyone could enjoy and we (well, most of us) don't even have to fly accross the ocean to get there.

Sometimes it requires "a foreigner" to remind us of some of the great tourist attractions we have in this country. I remember reading a poll once in a travel magazine that only about 5% of New Yorkers have actually visited the Statue of Liberty.