Some of you may know that I do a lot of walking in an effort to preserve/strengthen my health. Being old sucks as you get sick & hurt more easily. Walking is very pleasant when one has a companion to walk with. Usually, I do not have that companion. So, to gain my revenge upon all those walking companions who failed to show up, I create these walking blogs to take you, dear reader, along on a mental journey with me, and show you just how much you missed by not going with me when I invited you.  Heh, it’s a kind of trollish revenge that doesn’t actually hurt anyone, but gives me a good justification for inflicting all my amateur photography on the world.

So, on Friday, Feb. 19, 2016 I drove some 45 miles from my home in north central Phoenix to take my walk in the town of Wickenburg, Arizona. Wickenburg was once the gold-mining capital of the territory (before Arizona became a state). Now it is a kind of dude-ranch pseudo-western tourist destination, full of antique shops and boutiques designed to separate the tourist from their money. Mixed in with all the cowboy kitsch are some good authentic things if you know how to recognize and find them, and care about that sort of thing–I recognize them, but I don’t care about them for the most part. Pointing out the touristy crap made in China and the authentic stuff made in the west (including Mexico) would be a totally different blog. If you have your walking shoes on, then let’s take a hike. For the most part I will just show you pictures and let you make your own mental commentary.

(Unwanted) “improvements” in the way WordPress constructs its blogs for us has made it more difficult for me to achieve the effects I actually want in these little travel essays, including making it more difficult to insert individual comments. So, the pictures are not in the sequence that I took them, nor is there space to make individual comments. All I can say is that I saw all this during my walk in Wickenburg. Biggest surprise, the railroad stuff. I had no idea it was even there. My thanks to Conductor Jim for showing me around the rather Spartan facilities inside the caboose. This place didn’t allow me to climb into the engine like I did when I was in Washington last year–still it is a magnificent piece of machinery.

If you’ve ever been to Wickenburg, or if  you have a question about any of  these pix, why not leave a comment?

–Ken, Feb. 21, 2016