The town marshal wandered over and said: “Howdy strangers.” With his hand resting on the Colt 45 six-shooter in his holster, he asked where we were from. When we replied Australia, he fixed us with a steely gaze and said very quietly, “Make sure you stay outta trouble in my town.” We were in Tombstone, Arizona, and had just been transported back to the Wild West in this town of historic buildings and re-enactors strolling around in period costume.
Arizona is in the south-west of the USA, home to the Grand Canyon that we had visited previously. It’s a great motorcycle destination with good bike roads, lots of history, and excellent scenery ranging from rocky deserts to forests. In the remote south-east of the state, we visited Chiricahua National Monument, a 49sq km area in the rugged Chiricahua Mountains called a “wonderland of rocks”. National monuments are generally much smaller than national parks. Both are run by the National Parks Service and nearly always have good paved roads. Chiricahua was no exception. We stopped at the visitor centre there and learned about the Civilian Conservation Corps, set up during the Great Depression of the 1930s for unemployed men. In our trips throughout the USA, we have seen multiple buildings, roads, bridges, tunnels and lookouts in national parks, national monuments and
