The Arizona Mining Town Smackdown (Podcast S4:E4)
“Where you live – it just happens to be where you are. And you can make it whatever you want – but the people in Bisbee make it this wonderful thing.” -Paul
If you’ve been following us for a while, then you know that we also #vanlifed for a year a decade ago. Back then, we were living and traveling in an actual van – a Toyota Sienna minivan, that is. We drove more than 38,000 miles, we hiked a lot, and we saw great swaths of the country. It was easier to camp in popular places back then – we usually stayed in developed campgrounds in or near national parks and other well-visited sites, without any advance planning. We were able to roll into places like Glacier National Park in the afternoon and get a campsite for that night without having reservations. There were some places we struck out, but they were the exception, not the rule. That doesn’t seem possible anymore. Now you need a reservation just to enter many of the popular parks.
Back in 2012, we weren’t able to do any off-road or even much graded gravel road stuff in our stock minivan. We were too inexperienced; we didn’t have the right gear. This time around, because we’re avoiding busy places and because we intentionally got a setup that could get onto the roads we were too scared to drive last time, we haven’t been repeating ourselves too much.
But in Arizona, we did end up revisiting some places, because Arizona has so many places that we love. We’ve even gone back to them a few times in the in-between years. So this time around, we ended up re-re-re-visiting some places.
For two of these places, Bisbee and Jerome, we thought it’d be interesting to look back at our very first visits and see what has changed in the past ten years in these two famous Arizona mining towns. Paul wrote a funny comparison of the two towns on our blog back in 2012. Back then, Bisbee was our favorite Arizona mining town winner by a hair. Do we still feel the same way?
And…what happens when we decide to record after we’re a couple drinks in on a Saturday night? We end up with some great insights sprinkled with a bunch of f-bombs and a few accidental drunk history-esque moments.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
