The Bisbee Pirate Weekend in the port city of Bisbee Arizona goes all weekend in some form or another, but the vending portion is only on Saturday. We went up Friday night with reservations, we hoped, at the Silver King Hotel, which claims to have the country’s smallest bar. Indeed, Room 4 in the hotel is a functioning bar with 4-6 seats depending on how you define seat. The rest can brave the lobby? Parlor? Big room with chairs and a couch, and , more often, the patio beyond. Besides that attraction, it was also about half the price of the other nearby historic hotels. We soon found out why.

The hotel has maybe 12 other rentable rooms with communal bathrooms – that’s right – and key to the front door attached to your room key, because once the bar closes up – you are on your own.

There is also no AC. Bisbee is about 5000 feet above sea level, so the highs were barely 90, but it didn’t get down below 80 until after midnight. Fans can only do so much.

Pirate weekend is loud and drunk, particularly if you are in the middle of it, as the Silver King is. We contributed, but we are not the revelers we used to be. So if we seemed grouchy, we were on short rest.

The Silver King was across the street from City Park – the vending area, which is the size of a large backyard. Happily, they only had 16 vendors.

The problem is that Bisbee has no level surfaces. City park can be reached by the long stairwell up the south end. The shorter stairwell on the east side. Or by a narrow road across the north end passing a gate that had room to unload a single vehicle at a time. We arrived on time and were still somehow the last in and the last out.

We sold almost no pirate clothes, despite bringing plenty. The Pirate Fest has been an annual thing for some time, and all the locals had their costumes. We moved some belly-dance and some other items that covered costs.

Bisbee is an old mining town shoved into a canyon. When the mines closed it nearly became a ghost town until it was discovered by hippies seeking cheap, weird real-estate. The locals describe it as Mayberry on Acid. There is street art everywhere you look. And in historic downtown, you are never out of staggering distance from a bar.

The town fills up on weekends and the limited parking fills up with it. When we pulled out of city park after load-out I had to park a good half mile, and several hundred vertical feet, from the Silver King.

The restaurant in the Copper Queen hotel has respectable cocktails and some of the best steak we’ve had in a long time. Seriously, go for the steak. Stay for the pirate nonsense if you want to.