Road Trip: Bisbee, Arizona

If you are looking for funk, go to Bisbee. If you want to find a nice little town full of old-time hippies and other individualists, all nestled in some beautiful hills in the southeastern part of Arizona, take the trip and bring your walking shoes. If you are offended by public nudity (on roller skates!), rampant tattoos and body piercings, and other sights that might make you stop in your tracks, perhaps you should just go ahead and book your trip to Branson instead.

Bisbee is perched on fold after fold of hilly terrain. The little miner's houses there were going for a song at one time a couple of decades ago when the mining industry left, and that is how the old hippies ended up there. They couldn't have been too old, or too arthritic, because getting to those houses involves many, many stairs going up and down the hillsides.

See that healthy woman way at the bottom of all those flights of stairs? She is young, she is spry, she has powerful lungs, and she is strong because she lives in Bisbee. She is probably on her way to her job in an art gallery because naturally art is very big in this colony of artists. Come back tomorrow and we'll look at a few examples of public art in Bisbee, and you will experience what will hopefully be your first and last example of questionable taste on The Zees Go West.