Writings By Location| Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Anyway, back to the search for cowboys. After a few days of recuperating (if you can call it that) in the distant hills with Erin's three- and five-year old nieces, we left to begin our drive into real cowboy country: Arizona.
I can't say we saw a whole lot of cowboys screaming across the state in a single day at 85 miles an hour. We did pass through Tombstone, but passed on the opportunity to see the washed up actors they call "cowboys", wandering around the cardboard mockups of the "OK Corral", who failed to make it to the "big leagues" at the Paramount Studio Western Shootout Extravaganza, twice a day every day, once on Sundays. We even slid right through Tuscon, and managed to resist the temptation to visit "The Thing?", a magnificent yellow two-story tumor growing out of a Dairy Queen offering endless supplies of the usual souvenir schlock, and sprouting up in the middle of nowhere, but with billboards posted every mile for twenty miles in either direction — Arizona's answer to Wall Drug, only with a question mark.
It was our final desination for the day, 500 miles beyond where we began, that offered the most promise. I'm speaking, of course, about the town of Willcox, Arizona: home of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. What better place to find cowboys than at their very own mecca?
The town of Willcox is your typical Interstate town, with the usual Super 8 Motel, Taco Bell, and overpriced gas stations. Though the town had barely 1000 residents, the best-rated restaurant in town was "Michael's Fine Dining", offering "The Best Prime Rib in the State", albeit at Vegas-buffet prices. You might think it's scary to learn that this "best food" in town was actually located in a Best Western hotel (where, coincidentally, we chose to stay). But we find it even scarier that our culinary senses have eroded to the point where we find the dinner served at a Best Western to actually be halfway decent. We may be more ready for those third-world countries than we'd thought.
