Tombstone RV Park & Campground - Tombstone, AZ

 Traveling across the country and not stopping in Tombstone, Arizona when you have horses seemed like a waste, so of course we are spending a good week here in Tombstone.

We are staying at the Tombstone RV Park & Campground. Our horses are sharing a really good-sized pen with a small shade shelter.

This is one of the tent sites at the campground

We have full hook-up and a really nice pull-through site.

There is a heated pool which is making us both extremely happy.

Our niece, her husband, and our great-nephew came down to spend the weekend with us. They are staying at a motel a few blocks away. Ari is getting some much needed dog time.

Jayden came early on Saturday morning so he & Ari could ride into town.

While Jayden & Ari were off riding, Dayna, Steve & I played tourist in the town of Tombstone. Our first stop was the Boothill Cemetery to pay our respects.

The largest grave is for the Clayton gang - of the OK Corral shoot-out fame.

The tombstone reads:

Here lies George Johnson Hanged by Mistake 1882

He was Right

We was Wrong

But we strung him up

And now he is gone.

Dayna and I visited the OK Corral and watched the re-enactment of the gun fight. The re-enactment was high camp - lots of humor and some gun play.

These are the stables at the OK Corral where the horses were kept.

There is also a small blacksmith area.

We walked around the Tombstone area. Tombstone has basically been preserved as a tourist attraction with a lot of souvenir shops, saloons, and restaurants. It is not as nice as downtown Nashville or the tourist area of Jackson, Wyoming, but it is fun to walk around.

Lots of costume shops where you can buy Western costumes that you would never wear except on a stage or at Halloween.

There are several small museums charging from $5 to $15 with displays like this one where you can see items from the 1800s. You can see similar items if you go into any antique shop for free. However in the antique shop, they probably won't be labeled or displayed as nicely.

We paid $5 to see the "World's Largest Rose Bush", which is quite impressive. It must be really something in the spring and summer when it is in bloom.

I am not sure if this bridle was ever actually used on any woman or if some blacksmith created it as a joke and then sold it to the museum as an actual thing.

Turns out that these were used in the 15th and 16th centuries in Scotland and England, but there is no recorded use of them in the "New World" or North America.  The label is dated 1632, so I am not sure how it found it's way in a museum celebrating a town that was founded some 200 years later. I would be interested to learn exactly what the provenance of this device actually is.