You have three blue-sky days...

I don't know that I'd call Bisbee pretty, just very different. It's an old copper-mining town -- you can take a tour and go down into the mine; the guy who led our tour had worked in that mine. But also you can see the remains of what the copper companies did to the land by looking at the landscape surrounding the town.

 

Raft the Ocoee River in eastern Tennessee. That afternoon, drive to Chattanooga for a Lookouts game. There's a hotel there (can't remember the name of it) that was used as a Civil War hospital. It's within walking distance of the ballpark and, most importantly, stumbling distance from the bar district.

It's been covered in both Outside and Men's Journal, but canoeing the Mississippi River intrigues me to no end.

Eat at Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero restuarant in Clarksdale, Miss. Go on a full moon night, and head over the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest blues guitarist that ever lived. See if the devil approaches you. Head up to Tunica for some donkfest poker where the players are either retirees playing like rocks or Ole Miss frat boys wearing iPods and sunglasses at the $1-5 ($100 max) NL table.

Speaking of Ole Miss ... go to a tailgate at the Grove.

Key West's Fantasy Fest ... like Mardi Gras, but raunchier.

Spend a day drinking at the Tin Can in St. Louis (which should be in the next Best Bars list). http://www.tincantavern.com/

Get an invitation to one of Hefner's big parties. Chronicle what happens in the Grotto ... unless it means seeing Fred Durst or Pauly Shore naked.

 

Bisbee was one of the bigger towns in Arizona once- had 9,000 folks in 1910. It's in steep valley so many of the sidewalks in town have steps. Yeah, there's a horrendous strip mine nearby. The architecture's great and it has a pleasant vibe. When I camped there, there were cliffs nearby that had so much talc in them that you could walk up to a cliffside and just break off a hunk of rock. Weird.

Before it became a hippie haven, its main claim to fame was when Phelps Dodge organized a bunch of thugs to literally remove all the miners, most of whom were on strike and many of whom were members of the then-powerful IWW. Bastards rounded people up at gunpoint in the early morning, marched 'em to a baseball field, herded them onto boxcars and took 'em to a remote location in the boot heel of New Mexico, where they languished without water or food for a while in the hamlet of Hermanas before finally being fed and later escorted by federal troops to Columbus, where they were detained, some for months, for the "crime" of organizing.

http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/index.html

Fuck you, overlords of Capital, past and present. Solidarity forever.

 

Winnipeg.

A date with Flasher watching the Flames against Oilers.

A day in Toronto.

 

A man after my own heart. I went to Cawker City to see the twine ball a few years back. Actually drove by it once or twice before someone at the post office told me where it was. Yes, I'm blind, apparently.
You can spend a couple days just driving around Kansas and seeing some of the weird, cool stuff there. Get off I-70 around Salina and head north to Minneapolis. There's a place called Rock City, which is basically a bunch of natural concrete boulders in the middle of a field. The tallest one is about 25 or 30 feet tall and you can climb all over them.
From there, head west to Cawker City to see the twine ball, then south to the barbed wire museum in LaCrosse. Or skip the barbed wire museum if you have a life. You can head east toward I-35 and have a picnic at Coronado's Heights, which is an old WPA site on a hill smack dab in the middle of the Kansas prairie. You can see for miles up there.
Then head down to Hutchinson for the night, get up on day two and visit the air and space museum. Lots of cool stuff there, including the Apollo 13 capsule and an SR-71. Do all this on a nice, early summer day when the sun sets around 9, and it's almost like heaven.

 

If you go to downtown Clarksdale, Miss., at midnight, you'd better have a gun in that guitar case.

 

Nice call on the Tin Can. You can actually get a beer there for 50 cents, if you go on Tuesday nights at 10. And for not much more the rest of the week. They make a damn good BBQ pork steak sandwich, too.

 

Yeah, that "50 cent beers for the next 50 minutes" deal on Tuesday night absolutely destroyed me last time I was there.

Between the characters drinking there, the variety of cheap beers and the old-school Sega in the game room, I could walk into that bar when it opened and not leave until it closed.

 

Was there last month. I wasn't really paying attention to the food, although I do remember the fried tamales being tasty. I just enjoyed hanging out for three hours having a few drinks, playing pool and listening to the house bluesman hold court.

As to what Three Bags said, before I realized where Ground Zero was, I was a few blocks away at a store and asked the owner, 'Hey, I'm in town for the afternoon, any good bars to check out?' He looked at me for a few seconds, and said, 'Well, you look like you can take care of yourself, but I wouldn't walk into any of these country bars around here if I were you.' I then explained I meant tourist bars and he pointed me to Ground Zero.

Eh, Key West is weird and raunchy 365 days a year, and if you go anytime other than FantasyFest, you won't have to deal with nearly as many drunken idiots. Of course, you might like the experience of navigating through a maze of vomit on Duval Street.

 

We are talking about Jones here.

Maybe he could set up camp at that clothing-optional rooftop bar.

 

When I was there years ago for FantasyFest, on one corner there were girls flashing on a balcony overlooking Duval, while on the street below a guy dressed as Jesus was carrying a homemade cross and asking passers-by to repent.

 

I wouldn't even care if the skies were blue. It would be better if it was cloudy and drizzling. If I could do anything I would annihilate this entire frikkin' planet. I'd have a total Joker grin as I was blaster to oblivion with everybody else [except Mike Tyson...he gets blasted to Bolivia which wouldn't really exist at that point since the whole planet is destroyed. So yeah...Mike goes too].