It's Museum Day in Prescott, Arizona

Even though the sun barely peeked through the overcast today in downtown Prescott, we didn't care. We had booked an extra night here at the Point of Rocks RV camp in Prescott and today we had the whole day to fritter away on fun stuff. Unlike most people, fun stuff to the Happy Wanderers is most often comprised of antiques hunting, book store prowling, or historic museum wandering. Even though we ran across ample examples of the two former examples, today we intended to spend at least the first half of the day in the Sharlot Hall Museum just down the street from the court house in central Prescott.

Sharlot Hall was a giant in the annals of Arizona history. Here's a bit of her biography courtesy of the web site www.sharlot.org: "Sharlot Hall Museum is named after its founder, Sharlot Mabridth Hall (1870-1943), who became well known as a poet, activist, politician, and Arizona’s first territorial historian. Sharlot Hall was one of the West’s most remarkable women. As early as 1907, Ms. Hall saw the need to save Arizona's history and planned to develop a museum. She began to collect both Native American and pioneer material. In 1927, she began restoring the first Territorial Governor’s residence and offices and moved her extensive collection of artifacts and documents opening it as a museum in 1928."

Concetta and I thought that the museum in total was one of the finest we've yet visited. Everything from the John C. Fremont house, used when he was the (5th) territorial governor, to a frontier print shop, a vintage school house, and a log cabin used by the first territorial Governor, John Noble Goodwin. There's a new building for changing exhibits and comes complete with a very nice movie theater. There's a transportation museum where we got to see some wonderful examples of wooden wheeled bicycles, a stagecoach and other horse-drawn vehicles, as well as a 1920s-era Star automobile owned by Sharlot Hall. I was especially interested in the Star since my mom learned to drive in a Star back in the 1940s.

Also on the property was a very nice 19th century Victorian cottage once owned by one of the richest families in Arizona. The cottage now plays host to a very fine gift shop where you can buy anything from books on the history of the area to a myriad of handmade craft items

The docents at the museum proved to be some of the most knowledgeable and helpful we've encountered on our travels. In fact, they enthusiastically shepherded us from room to room, explaining each and every item on display and answering all of our questions.

Consequently, the morning hours flew by swiftly and before we knew it we'd run well past the lunch hour. Making our escape, we headed back for the RV, parked ever so patiently in a shopping mall parking lot about six blocks away. Then, while Concetta set up our lunch I dashed over to Albertson market and grabbed a few items for our pantry. Then, lunch over, we spent an hour or so driving some of the roads to the west of Prescott just to see the country. It's very, very pretty here and I suspect a tad more pleasant living here than at the lower elevations found in Phoenix and Tuscon. Prescott is just a little higher in elevation than our Carson City altitude of 4,700 feet. Prescott, as I learned today, lies at approximately 5,500 feet.

So now, we're kicking back, enjoying a cocktail, and catching up on the news of the day. Coach is all set up, showers are out of the way, and we're looking forward to dinner in about an hour. I discovered yesterday, at the suggestion of the camp host here at Point of Rocks, that I can pick up television signals in the RV if we have a wind-up antenna. Well, now, I always knew I had one of those, but since I hadn't really received any formal instructions from the previous owner about how to operate it, I'd been content to just ignore it. Of course, the camp host was rather surprised to hear I'd never tried using it and told me to just crank it up, connect the cable, tell the TV to run through the channel search routine, and presto, you're in business, she said.

Naturally, I doubted it would be that easy. But, hey, she was right. All last evening we watched TV via our rooftop antenna and the picture was just as crystal-clear as had we been connected to cable TV. Boy was I surprised. Now, all I have to do is remember to crank the dang thing down again before I drive anywhere.