On Thursday November 9th we drove from Benson to Tucson, settling in at Justin’s Diamond J RV Park in the Sonoran Desert.  It was easy to tell we were in Tucson when we saw the tall saguaros and heard the coyotes howling at night.  We were last in Tucson in December, 2013.  You can read about that visit here: Tucson, Tucson Mountain Park and Tucson Desert Museum.

With temperatures averaging 10 to 14 degrees above average, on Saturday we spent a very hot day at Old Tucson.  In 1939 Columbia Pictures began building a replica of the 1860 Tucson city as a setting for the movie “Arizona” starring Jean Arthur and William Holden.  Over 350,000 handmade adobe bricks were used to build the dusty town. 

Old Tucson has been used for 400 films and commercial productions.  Some example movies:  

• “Gunfight at the OK Corral”
• “Cimmaron”
• “McLintock”
• “El. Dorado”
• “Joe Kidd”

and many episodes of TV shows: 

• “Wagon Train”
• “Little House on the Prairie”
• “Bonanza”
• “The High Chaparral”
• “Death Valley Days”
• “ Gunsmoke” to name just a few.  

In the museum they had the shirt and hat worn by Hoss in “Bonanza” as well as some of the clothes worn on “Little House on the Prairie”.

It was easy to spend an entire day there riding the little train around the park, viewing live western shows, riding a stagecoach, touring an old mine and seeing reenactments of western scenes.  

Next up: more Tucson