The Streets of Jerome

On Friday we decided to return to Jerome and walk some of the streets. We had driven through this side-hill town a few weeks ago and we knew that we wanted to return. Jerome is an old time mining town built on top of huge ore deposits of copper, silver and gold. The mines ran out years ago and the business of the town now is to mine the tourists. There are a couple of hotels and several restaurants. We started at the lower edge of town at a shop that specializes in solid copper household items with some other stuff thrown in.

You would think that since Jerome is the source of millions of tons of copper that this stuff might be local, but actually most of the contents have been collected in Europe over the past thirty years. They did have some copper nuggets and copper ore that was neat, but even that came from Michigan. We resisted the high prices and kept on going.

Parking can be hard to find but we made out pretty well, finding spots in a couple of places which let us see about two-thirds of the town. But this is a town that is absolutely not wheelchair friendly. Rough roads and sidewalks and a lack of curb cuts combined with high thresholds made visiting a real chore. Of course, that didn't stop us from catching the high points. One of them is the Mining Museum.

It had quite a selection of copper souvenirs, as you would expect, but it also has an excellent collection of historical memorabilia arranged in a timeline display. The museum part cost $2 ($1 for seniors) and is well worth it. They even have a darkened area made out to look like the inside of a mine, complete with drill and powder magazine. They had an old deck of cards that was printed before they put the numbers on them, the first I'd seen.

Another museum is the old movie house. That's an old projection camera out front.

Inside, it's mostly a tourist mine. Interestingly, we found that most of the shops, especially this one, had merchandise catering to the biker crowd. Skull motifs were in abundance.

The town is really an artist colony now and it shows up in some of the shops. There are some really great local artists evidenced by the wide variety of excellent fiber, wood, metal and glass items offered.

After pushing the chair all over town, I was hungry. We had managed to park just around the corner from the Mining Museum and when we returned to the car, the sound of jazz was coming from the restaurant that we had parked by. The sign said it was the English Kitchen but inside they called it Bobby D's BBQ. One look at the bar was all I needed.

We had the place to ourselves. They featured lots of BBQ dishes so I had a BBQ melt with fresh hand made slaw and an excellent dark stout.

We sat for quite a while enjoying the food and the music and the atmosphere and then it was time to go home. But we'd sure like to come back. For all the difficulty, Jerome is a neat town to explore and we haven't seen all of it. Rumor has it that there is great local fudge and ice cream up there somewhere.

Saturday we rested up and got some groceries and today we're going up to Flagstaff for a party in honor of the couple whose wedding we just attended. The adult? members of the group are looking forward to a paintball war afterward.