Feb 6, Bisbee

It’s a lovely day in Bisbee, with no clouds at all in the sky that’s the color of Bisbee turquoise. We spent the morning doing some geo-caching around the town. The very first one was just a few hundred yards from the RV park. The thing with geo-caching is that it is seductive. The next cache is a quarter mile down the road, the one after that is only a tenth of a mile, and so forth. Before you know it, you’re a couple miles into the walk, and in Bisbee, that means uphill. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s all uphill in both directions. Gasp, gasp, gasp. The other thing about Bisbee is the stairs. Back in the late 1800s when Bisbee was the
biggest city between Chicago and San Francisco, it just grew in every which direction, but mostly up. Severely up. So the houses cling to the sides of the hills and there aren’t roads anywhere in sight. Just stairs. Over a thousand stairs. Of course, the last cache of the morning was at the top of one of those flights of stairs. I kept trying to convince that infernal GPS that there had to be an easier way, but it kept pointing resolutely up those stairs. I would never have intentionally set off to climb up the stairs, but since we were on the hunt, up those stairs we went and successfully located the cache. Then we had the two mile walk back to Cleo. Uphill all the way, of course.

In the afternoon we went on the tour of the Queen Mine, a hard rock mine of 39 levels and hundreds of miles of tunnels. We look so cute in our hard hats and yellow slickers. The guide acted like we were trainee miners until one of the people on the tour, a tiny bit of a woman, started sassing him about it and it turned into a comedy duet between them. I took some pictures which are very strange looking. They’d be good examples of photos in a “where in the world is this” contest. The photos are of us in our miners' suits, taking the tram into the mine, the rock tunnel and a sample of real copper ore.