![]() The owner was very friendly and sharing about his various bean sources. Old Bisbee Roasters is highly recommended for a great cup of coffee (I bought a lb. You can also tour a copper mine (we did not so can't review that). ![]() There are better gift, gallery and antique shops there and better restaurants. I would recommend the town of Bisbee as a half to full day trip. In my opinion, Tombstone was just a giant tourist trap in a negative sense, just a few attractions such as a slow stage coach ride a few blocks around the town and re-enactment of the shoot-out involving the Earp brothers (behind walls, with a cost), a few restaurants and lots of souvenir crap shops. There doesn't seem to be much to do in the town of Benson itself but the towns of Tombstone and Bisbee are not too far away. There is a full grocery store in very close walking distance. There are activities throughout the week and also the observatory which you can read about on their website. There are three dog relief areas which the residents and workers keep well maintained and clean. You will notice park workers going around maintaining the park through-out the day, such as sweeping the rock back into the sites if it got out onto the street. ![]() Nice tall trees which also make the park feel like a real neighborhood. Parking pads in pull-through sites are paved and the rest of the sites are nice landscape rock with picnic table. ![]() All park streets are wide, nicely paved and curbed, making this seem like a real neighborhood, not just a temporary park. Very, very clean and well-maintained, in this aspect it's the best RV park we've seen. Even if you don't have such an interest, the sheer scale of the mirrors being made and the length of time each takes to make should impress you. If you have any interest in astronomy, this tour is not to be missed. Apparently, the 8.4-meter maximum size is dictated by the width of US highway underpasses. Our tour guide also showed us the equipment the lab uses to optically test the mirrors and the equipment and area they use to pack each mirror up for shipment. The other mirror we saw was being polished on a huge rotating platform. One mirror was "baking" in a huge rotating oven, which is spun in order for the glass to reach the appropriate parabolic shape as the once-molten glass slowly cools. That telescope will use a total of seven 8.4-meter mirrors, which is the largest that the mirror lab can make. We lucked out and they were working at the time on mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope. Then it moves to the telescope-making facility proper, where you can, if you are lucky, view mirrors in a number of different stages of completion. The tour starts out in a lecture room where you get a slide presentation. This tour should be fascinating for anyone even remotely interested in how the largest mirrors in the world for some of the largest telescopes in the world are made. If they had been allowed to join, the tour group would have almost doubled in size. The necessity of that was driven home when we saw a number of people being denied entry to our tour because they didn't already have valid tickets (they actually had tickets for the same time slot on a different day). We had, of course, purchased tickets several weeks prior. My wife and I visited this one-of-a-kind facility one afternoon in early November last year during a two-night, two-day stay in Tucson.
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