Steins Cemetery

The FindAGrave app isn’t perfect but it did lead me here and that definitely counts for something!

Normally the drive back from anywhere feels so much shorter because you have whatever you did to occupy your mind. This definitely should have been the case, since Jeff and I had just gotten married a few short days earlier, buuut the drive from Phoenix back to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was long. LONG. Loooong. I guess what made it feel so long was that we knew we were on a tight-ish schedule. There was time to explore but at the same time, we all just really wanted to get some miles behind us so that it didn’t seem quite so daunting. Fifteen and a half hours is a lot of time in the car!

It had only been a few hours since our detour to Tombstone, AZ but we were all ready to find somewhere to stop again. This will be a repeating theme throughout the rest of the posts I have from our drive after the wedding. I love long car rides but what’s the fun if you’re not stopping every twenty minutes to check out things along the side of the road and take photos?! Luckily, my husband and my parents feel the same way.

I haven’t been to too many of them, but I’m hooked on desert cemeteries. On any road trip, I’m going to make an effort to find interesting cemeteries but in the desert my need to find them is even more intense. The FindAGrave app showed Steins Cemetery coming up, it looked pretty small. Only 24 memorials are listed but the three small thumbnails in the app looked promising. I was stoked from the second we pulled up! It was beautiful! Okay, maybe not everyone’s vision of a beautiful cemetery but the absolute perfect desert cemetery. A strange variety of memorial types – flat stones, crumbling concrete crosses, and small wooden planks – all weathered by the hot sun. No two headstones were the same, and most weren’t even remotely similar to the ones beside it. It was an interesting hodgepodge of styles, for sure!

The cemetery is small but an excellent place to stop, stretch your legs, and of course, poke around a bit. There’s even a geocache right outside the cemetery! Here are five reasons to start geocaching, if you haven’t already.

More from this trip;
▴ just married!
▴ instant photos from our wedding week
▴ that time I got married in a ghost town
▴ Cadillac Ranch
▴ Boothill Graveyard
▴ Twin Arrows + Two Guns