18th May – Benson to Las Cruces via Tombstone

It was slightly cooler today and perfect riding weather. We set off early this morning because we had a long ride ahead and wanted to take in Tombstone, which was off our route but too close to miss.

We went out to find our bikes being menaced by 4 large Harleys which had been ridden in last night by some guys in a motorcycle club. We tried to get talking to them but they didn’t seem to be too impressed with either us or our bikes! Concluding that they seemed to be rather wedged up their own tailpipes we left them to it. One of their bikes was a ridiculously heavily customised bit of automotive silliness to the extent that just about every part, from the handlebar ends to the air filters, seemed to have been fitted with a tapering point. In the event of an accident it would have been like wrestling with a half-ton metal porcupine but, hey, that’s what being a rough, tough Harley rider is all about.

The excursion to Tombstone was rather further than we expected but was well worth the detour. The town itself is rather touristy but at least they have made the effort to preserve the buildings as they used to be and we did get an impression of what a Western town would have looked like in those days. Unfortunately the house of ill repute has been converted into a souvenir shop and Dutch Annie has long since gone to rest in Boot Hill after her exertions (kindly note that I have avoided the use of the term “laid” to rest in this context). Boot Hill was very striking. Entrance to the cemetery is free providing you pay $3 to go through the gift shop first! We were greeted by a very elderly, very thin lady who looked as if she might have been disinterred from the cemetery herself on account of them being short-staffed in the gift shop today. The casualties of the gunfight at the OK Corral are buried there as are the many other residents of Tombstone who met violent ends in the 1880s. That aside it is a peaceful spot looking over the valley and if one was to be shot or stabbed to death in Tombstone at least it would be a nice place to end up.

After the Tombstone excursion we went back to rejoin the Interstate and amazingly got through a Border Patrol checkpoint without Mark being subjected to a strip-search or an invasive internal examination.

We followed the interstate for 230 miles, mainly through broad, flat desert although we did pass through some rocky outcrops and we could see the mountains in the distance where the Apaches, Cochise and Geronimo, made their last stand against the encroaching settlers and army. There wasn’t much to enliven the trip except for the occasional dust-storm and lots of dust-devils. For the uninitiated, dust devils are where the air currents stir up the dust on the ground and it rises in a column up into the air like a mini tornado.

After an epic 308 miles in total we got to the Holiday Inn Express at Las Cruces (the crossroads). We booked in, cleaned up and went into town where we have just eaten two superb steaks, drunk some local beer and a couple of glasses of very tolerable wine at the “Something” Eagle.

It turned out that the taxi-driver on the return journey and I had both faced down the Soviet hordes massed at the West German border in the early 1980s, although his service had been at some military base in Germany while mine (which I sort of glossed over in our conversation) had been largely spent at a TA Drill Hall in Middlesbrough!

We are planning to get to Roswell NM tomorrow which should put us within a day’s ride of Texas. We’ll be looking out for crashed flying saucers along the way.