101 in 1001: 086 tour arizona mining towns with joe [completed december '07]
the missus and i really agonized over this one. he offered several times to detour through another town (prescott, which rhymes with triscuit, not ascot) in order to satisfy the plural part of the list item, but we were more interested in getting back to phoenix in time to have a leisurely dinner at the tee pee* than i was in completing the task as literally as possible. i have visited more than one arizona mining town - we buzzed past globe a few years ago - but that was before my 101 in 1001 adventures began. i can but hope that posterity will exonerate me.
we stayed in a haunted hotel and were in fact disturbed in the night: the utter absence of sound and the hot breath of the radiator kept both of us up until about six in the morning. i hate to be one of those city slickers who can't sleep without the white noise of traffic and police sirens, a la john cusack's character in midnight in the garden of good and evil, but so i am.
jerome is now an artists' colony rather than a mining town (for the most part - there was one active site down the mountain), and the locals have realized the value of the town's picturesque decrepitude; while a few buildings (like our hotel) have been restored and maintained, just as many have been allowed to tumble apart in extremely attractive ways. i wish our friend jodie had been along for the trip: i got some fair-to-middling photos as we strolled around (the full set is here), but pros like her must get amazing stuff. visit jerome, internets! i enjoyed myself there much more than i did in sedona the next day, crystal vortices and possibility-of-running-into-axl-rose or no. how about you - visited anything sexy lately?
*gratuitous side note: my sister-in-law and i ordered the presidential special, which is what george w. bush ate when he visited the place on a campaign stop in '04. unusually, he made an excellent choice.
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