When I was asked to follow up Weird Texas by gathering offbeat reconnaissance from the Grand Canyon State, I grabbed the wheel of the first rental car I could find and stepped on the gas. With a sack full of clean T-shirts and aerosol cheese, I zig-zagged my way from city to suburb, to high desert and back again, recording all my peculiar encounters along the way.
I saw dinosaurs, found long-forgotten tombs, met eccentric characters and tip-toed through haunted relics. I uncovered century-old photographs of vigilantes giving a corpse his last drink of whiskey, dug up the history on a cave of death turned into a tourist attraction, and sat at the controls of a Cold War ICBM. And it's all here in this full-color, hardbound roadside travel guide.
3 Comments
Praise for Weird Arizona:
More praise for Weird Arizona!
Howdy there! I'm an Arizona native, and currently about a quarter of the way through Weird Arizona at this moment. I have to say I'm loving it, and love the weird stories about where I'm from (there are certainly more than enough to choose from!). I'm looking forward to the rest of the book. However, I have to point out to you that you missed a huge chunk of urban legend, in reference to the San Xavier Mission. I was always told that the reason that San Xavier was missing a tower was that it was stolen! As the story goes, the domes were constructed someplace else and brought in by train. When the second dome was being brought in, the train was robbed by a band of outlaws, and the entire train was stole--dome included! The church didn't have money to purchase a second one, and so the dome sat unfinished! Whether the story is true I can't say, but that the commonly told urban legend around these parts. Happy travels to you!
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