Imagine my surprise – and excitement, of course! – when a couple of months ago I stumbled on an Instagram reel from Rob Wiethoff (John Marston in Red Dead Redemption & RDR2) talking about an event he was attending this summer in Tombstone, Arizona – and not just ANY event, an entirely Red Dead-themed event called “Tombstone Redemption”!

The event was actually originally announced in March of this year, so it was disappointing to realize we discovered it too late to snag a hotel in Tombstone itself. But I kept it in the back of my mind, and about three weeks out started checking availability twice a day. And hey, my persistence paid off – about two weeks ago I lucked upon someone’s cancelled room at the Tombstone Bordello Bed & Breakfast! So after work last Thursday Dean and I packed my car full of Red Dead costumes and began our trek to Arizona for this event.

We spent Thursday night at a friend’s house in Tuscon, which was great because we didn’t leave home until about 5 PM and ended up stuck in traffic on I-10 for over an hour thanks to a monsoon that literally blew TEN tractor trailers over. We also both had to work for a bit on Friday, but we still got to Tombstone, settled in to our B&B, and were out and about to explore the town a little before 2 PM…

After getting the lay of the land (which wasn’t hard; downtown/historic Tombstone is technically less than 5 blocks long and 3 blocks wide) we went back to our room to freshen up before grabbing dinner and drinks. (It also helped that it had already started to cool down!)

It was exciting that we were back out for less than an hour before we ran into our first cosplayers!

We ended up chatting with them for a bit under the overhang because there was a surprise rain shower…Dean and the Arthur cosplayer bonded over the impossible knot on Arthur’s hat, haha. And the rain shower made for a beautiful sunset!

We had dinner at Big Nose Kate’s, explored the little store/mine area in its basement, and then made our way to the Oriental Saloon, where we ended up spending quite a long time drinking and talking with some other fans…so long, in fact, that we got a much later start than expected on the first official day of the event.

Dean really wanted to sign up for the costume contest, but by the time we’d eaten breakfast it was already after 10 AM, so we walked over to Schieffelin Hall to sign up. Neither of us had ever done a costume contest before, and to be honest I wasn’t into the idea, but sometimes you gotta compromise with your SO, I guess 😉

Sign-ups took a lot longer than we expected (at least half an hour) because they were talking to everyone about their costumes. We found out the next day – AT the contest itself – that they were considering this “pre-judging”, so needless to say it felt a bit odd that it wasn’t explained that way/there was no announcement that you had to (or at least SHOULD) wear your contest costume when you went to sign up.

Anyway, we ran back to our room to finish getting ready and headed out a little after noon, with Dean dressed as RDR John Marston and me as Bonnie MacFarlane!

We grabbed coffee from the local espresso bar and then wandered around a bit with some friends (new and not-so-new), did a mini photo shoot in front of the Blackwater bank sign (see above) and then had a quick drink at the Crystal Palace before getting in line for autographs/photo ops with the actors at about 2:10 PM.

And we waited. And waited. And waited and waited and – okay, you catch my drift. Seriously though, it was probably about 100 degrees out, and 90% of the line wasn’t in shade. We would creep forward a few feet every 15-20 minutes, or so it seemed. We did at least have time to chat with the friends who were with us, meet some new people, and even got high fives from Steve Palmer (Bill Williamson) when he came out to walk the line and thank everyone for waiting so long <3

The actors were supposed to stop signing at 5 PM to do their 5:30 PM panel, but they ended up delaying the panel until I think about 6:30. We finally got into the signing area at about 5:45 but *only* because someone came out and said that anyone who didn’t need to meet Rob Wiethoff (John Marston) or Benjamin Byron Davis (Dutch Van der Linde) could go in. Thankfully we had Ben and Rob’s autographs from previous events so were able to get in and meet Alex McKenna (Sadie Adler), Curzon Dobell (Hosea Matthews), Gabriel Sloyer (Javier Escuella), Peter Blomquist (Micah Bell), Michael Mellamphy (Sean Macguire), and Kaili Vernoff (Susan Grimshaw).

All of the actors were super lovely despite having been in the sweltering Oriental Saloon signing for nearly 7 hours at that point. And at least we got to say hi to Rob on our way out – while I was lucky enough to moderate the Red Dead actors panel *and* run the Blackwater Squares game show at Dragon Con 2023, Dean wasn’t able to attend last year and was so excited to finally get to meet Rob – however briefly – in person 🙂

I definitely have more to say about the rest of Saturday evening/night, the costume contest on Sunday morning, and the event as a whole, but I’ll save that for part 2, so stay tuned!