Day Trip From Laughlin to Oatman

Hello again,

As we headed back toward Las Vegas, we stopped for a few nights in Laughlin, Nevada.  This is a small town on the Colorado River that is mostly large casino hotels.

We stayed at the Aquarius Casino Hotel in a really nice room on the 11th floor.




From Laughlin, there are more day trips to take.

One trip takes you along a dirt road through Christmas Tree Pass.

Christmas Tree Pass takes you through some beautiful desert with huge rock formations.















It seems like everywhere you go in the desert, you find evidence that other people have been there before you.



The fact that people have come before you is displayed in other ways too.  We could not find an explanation of why these displays were left behind but it sort of explains why they call it Christmas Tree Pass.





The christmas decorations go on for miles and really perk up the drive because you see a surprise around each curve in the road.

Another trip on another day took us to Oatman, Arizona.  

Oatman is another town located on old Route 66 but it is nowhere near Interstate 40 that bypassed it.  

Oatman was originally a tent city gold mining town and around 1915, two miners struck it rich with a $10 million gold find.

Shortly after that, the population grew to over 3,500 people.  

Tents were replaced with wooden buildings and adobe structures.  The Oatman Hotel was built in 1902 and is the oldest 2 story adobe building in Mojave County. 

You have to remember that Oatman is located in a very desolate desert area that has temperatures that soared to over 100º in the summer and dropped to windy freezing winters.  A very harsh environment to live, let alone work.

Oatman was named for a young girl, Olive Oatman, who was kidnapped by an Apache indian tribe and later sold to a Mojave Indian tribe.  Her face was tattooed by the indians which signified that she was a slave to the indians.  She was eventually rescued in 1897.







Around 1924, the main mining operation shut down and the miners started to leave.  When some of the miners left, they turned the donkeys that they had used for pack animals at their mining operations loose into the desert.

The donkeys survived and multiplied and are still living in the desert around the town.  They have become one of the main attractions in the town.

The donkeys wander all around the town and spend their time blocking traffic, waiting for people to feed them carrots that are purchased in the shops.



In 2009 when we first visited Oatman, we took my mom Bernice.  She and Suzie really had fun feeding the donkeys.





On this trip, there were still donkeys everywhere.  It is amazing that they go up onto the boardwalks but won't go into the shops where the carrots are sold.



CUTE !!!!



The Oatman Hotel has an ATM built into the outside wall on the boardwalk.



While we were there, we watched a bank robbery ..... well, sort of.  

The twice a day shootout was fun to watch.  The bad guys walked up to the ATM and demanded all the cash.  When that didn't work, they eventually walked into the hotel and came back with a bag of cash and then had a big shootout.

This is one of the bad guys.  He wasn't real smart and is the one who was shouting at the ATM, demanding cash.  He didn't make it through the shootout.



An interesting tidbit about the Oatman Hotel is that Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their honeymoon at the Oatman Hotel and their honeymoon suite is still a major attraction at the hotel.

Carol Lombard and Clark Gable



The honeymoon suite.




Clark Gable returned to the hotel often to play poker with the local miners. 

We headed back to Laughlin and we are now back in Las Vegas in our motorhome, waiting for parts to arrive so that the RV repair shop can complete the repairs.



We will send more of the blog soon and we will let you know when it is ready.

We hope that you can get out there and make every day a good one!!!

Tom & Suzie

Day trips from Laughlin, Nevada

Hello again,

As you head back toward Las Vegas, you can travel along the Colorado River.  Your trip will take you through the town of Parker, Arizona.  This is a resort area where lots of motels and RV parks cater to the summer boating crowd and the winter snowbirds.  

Also, along the river and the road are groups of wild burrows.  Sometimes, you have to stop because they are just wandering down the roadway and will walk right up to you car.

As you continue north, you come to Lake Havasu City.  This is also a large summer and winter resort town.  It is also the home of the London Bridge, which was brought here from London, piece by piece.  

The bridge was then reassembled by covering a reinforced concrete bridge with all of the original exterior stones of the London Bridge.  The bridge connects the town of Lake Havasu City with an island by spanning a portion of the Colorado River.





We continued north and stopped for a few nights in Laughlin, Nevada.  This is a small town on the Colorado River that is mostly large casino hotels.

Laughlin is a good place for day trips.

A nice day trip is to drive to Kingman, Arizona and then make the return trip via old Route 66, through Cool Springs and then back through Oatman, and on to Fort Mojave and Bullhead City before you get back to Laughlin.

On the way to Kingman, you can take a short side trip to Chloride, Arizona, an old, almost abandoned mining town.



As you drive through town, you should take a side road that takes you to the cemetery.




















There were a whole bunch of very interesting, very old graves.



The cemetery was very well cared for.









Chloride is also famous for petroglyphs and rock paintings so we hiked up a short canyon and found these.



Still working on the selfies.



Along with the ancient petroglyphs, there were more recent huge rock paintings.







The town is still occupied and has a few shops.



Suzie fit right in.



We then continued on to Kingman.

Kingman continues the Route 66 theme and has a very nice museum.

This is the Route 66 Powerhouse Museum




There were lots of interesting displays.



After lunch in Kingman, you follow old Route 66 back to Oatman.  The road is very curvy and travels through remote desert.

You can just imagine what the drive would have been like in the good old days before auto air conditioning or reliable autos for that matter.  Imagine driving you and the family across the scorching hot desert in the middle of the summer and coming across Cool Springs.  I bet they sold a lot of cold Cokes.





This town is gone now and only the old gas station is left but you can visualize what a harsh life this must have been.

From Cool Springs, it is about a 45 minute drive through old mining country until you get to Oatman.  All along the winding road are old, collapsed structures and big piles of mining tailings from the now abandoned gold mines.

Once through Oatman, it is a quick trip through the very modern Fort Mojave and Bullhead City to Laughlin. 

There is still lots more to come and we will let you know when the next chapter is available,

Get out there and make every day a good one,

Tom & Suzie

Into the desert

Hello again,

As we continued westbound from Williams on Interstate 40, we were actually following the general route of the old Route 66.  

When they built Interstate 40, they were bypassing Route 66 as they improved and widened the roadway.

They bypassed many cool old towns.  Often, as we drove down the freeway, we would take offramps that took us back to Route 66 and the old towns that have pretty much dried up without all of the traffic.

One town that is right next to the highway is Seligman and it didn't dry up and is a thriving tourist town that celebrates the good old days of Route 66.

This old storefront was all dressed up with mannequins and the touristy store below was thriving.









Yes, that is an airplane tail sticking out of the building!



After driving through Seligman, we continued on our way to Las Vegas.  We had to go to Las Vegas in order to have some repairs made on our motorhome.

While driving through Texas, our exhaust pipe came loose while we were driving down some rural country roads and the very hot exhaust from the turbocharger blasted directly onto several compartments back near the engine, causing quite a bit of heat damage.

There was no actual fire but the 1500º exhaust melted many wires and blistered some of the high pressure hydraulic lines that run our leveling system and melted some of the air lines that control our air brakes.  

We had the air brake lines patched up in Texas and then continued on to Las Vegas to a motorhome repair facility that could get us into their shop quickly.  

All of the shops we talked to in Texas were either too busy to look at us for another month or two or they said the job was too big and too complicated for their shop to handle.

We do not have an extended warranty on our motorhome but the shops in Texas suggested that we contact our insurance company because this was actually fire damage and they thought our comprehensive insurance might cover the repairs.  I immediately contacted Progressive Insurance and they said it might be covered and they would have an appraiser examine the motorhome when we got to Las Vegas.

The appraiser came as soon as we got to Las Vegas and Progressive decided that this damage was covered by our insurance and so they are helping us get the repairs done.

We have a problem, because we live full time in our motorhome and don't have anywhere else to live while our motorhome is in the shop.  

The nice people at Progressive reminded us that we pay extra on our policy for coverage of expenses if we have a problem that prevents us from being able to stay in our motorhome, so they will pay our hotel bills while we have to be out of the motorhome while repairs are being made.  

I know, right now this is starting to sound like a Progressive Insurance commercial but so far so good.  I will keep you posted on the final outcome.

Here are a couple of pictures of the damage that we could see from the outside.  They are still trying to figure out what else might be damaged due to wires melting and shorting out and frying other components somewhere else in the motorhome like electronic controllers and computers.

Here you can see how it has melted all of these wiring loom pieces together.  What you can't see is how the insulation has melted away inside the looms, allowing the bare wires to touch together.  We were really lucky there wasn't a BIG fire.



This picture shows our hydraulic leveling system and the high pressure hoses that were melted and blistered from the heat.



When we got to Las Vegas, we pulled into Arizona Charlies, our RV park/hotel/casino and set up camp.  In a couple of days, the Progressive adjuster arrived and after checking things over, approved our moving the motorhome to an RV shop that is right across the street for evaluation on what it will take to fix it.

The motorhome was there for 9 days and so we moved out of the motorhome and into various motels while the work was being done.    This in itself was an adventure because we have been living full time in a motorhome now for almost 10 years and are not used to worn out lumpy beds, thin walls with noisy neighbors and the sounds of people stomping around upstairs, showers running in the next room and toilets flushing all night long.

The first 3 nights we stayed at the Arizona Charlies hotel so we would be nearby if the shop finished their evaluation quickly and we could move back into our home.  After 3 days, the shop said things were much worse than they originally thought and they were going to need it for a while longer.

That is when we decided it was time for a road trip.  We took off in the car and headed for Quartzsite, Arizona which is a small desert town that is invaded in the winter by Snowbirds.  Snowbirds are people who live in cold parts of the country and Canada who take their RV's to warm places for the summer.  Their invasion is the reason we leave our Florida RV park in the winter.  It becomes so crowded that you can't even find a parking place at the grocery store or restaurant.

When I say invaded, I mean INVADED.  The year round population of quartzite is around 3,700 people.  In the winter, that swells to over 1,000,000 people who bring their RV's from colder climates to the moderate temperatures of Arizona.  Most don't stay in the town but park their rigs out on Bureau of Land Management desert around the town.

This is a picture of a postcard that we bought showing how the RV's just take over the place.



The winter is famous in Quartzsite for the huge swap meets, flea markets and RV shows that go on all winter.  That is why this was our first stop.

Unfortunately, we got there right at the beginning of the season and although many campers had arrived, the swap meets and flea markets were not there yet or were just setting up.  We left but we will be back before winter is over.

We continued on to Yuma, Arizona for the night.  

We stayed in an old but recently remodeled motel.  It didn't look like much on the outside but the room was beautiful.  It had cable TV with all of the movie channels free.  It also had free, very fast internet, a refrigerator, microwave, and everything in the room was new and clean.  It was really nice and we figured we would extend our stay in the morning and do some exploring around Yuma.

As we were getting back from dinner, the lady in the room next to ours poked her head out the door of her room and introduced herself and said that she has a rambunctious 4 year old and so if he makes too much noise to just pound on the wall and she would try to quiet him down.  

I am a trained investigator and I should have recognized a CLUE when I hear one but, oh no, we didn't move.

Well, it turns out that the kid wasn't that bad.  It was all of mom's doper friends that partied in the room starting at 1:00 AM that were the problem.

Pounding on the wall when we couldn't take it any more worked for about 5 minutes but then they started up again.  We tossed and turned until 2:00AM when I called the front desk.  They said they would call the room and ask them to be quiet.  That didn't work.

I called the manager again at 2:30AM and this time he said he would get up and go to the room and ask them to quiet down.  He did and they did...... for about 10 minutes.  Then, it took them almost an hour for all of the company to pack up and leave.

We spent that time, and the rest of the night peering out the window to make sure no one damaged our car.  

We decided not to stay another night and headed into California.

We drove westbound on Interstate 8 into California and eventually came to a spot that we have always wanted to visit but couldn't because it didn't look like a place you could drive in a big motorhome.

It is called Desert Tower and is located at the top of the boulder strewn mountains that separate the desert near El Centro, California from the coastal area around San Diego.

I'm not talking about a few rocks.  I am talking miles and miles of ROCKS.  Boulders bigger than a house!



At the top of the tallest mountain, right next to the freeway is Desert Tower.

  



We walked up the steps to the gift shop located in the bottom of the tower and paid $6.50 each for a ticket to climb to the top and also to explore the rock garden.  It was money well spent.

The climb to the top of the tower was interesting.  As we climbed the spiral staircase, we stopped on each floor to look at all of the neat stuff that was on display.







Once we got to the top, we had a great view back out over the desert.  On a normal day, you could probably see all the way to Yuma and all the way to Mexico but it was very windy on the day we were there and a big, dusty haboob (dust storm) was blocking some of the view with a giant dust cloud coming off the desert.







After we climbed back down from the top on the spiral stairs, we visited the rock garden.

As you stroll into the boulders, you wonder why someone would do this.  Then, you think about how boring it must have been out here in the middle of nowhere in the 1930's and it becomes obvious that carving monsters into the rocks would be a good idea.

The stairs at the base of the rocks is the entrance to the rock garden.  Can you see the monster carved into the rock?



At the stairs, you see the beginning of the carving.



These figures are carved right into the rocks.  They are not placed there.



You begin to wind your way through the rocks.







It was claustrophobic in a few places.



When you would pop out of a boulder pathway, you never knew what you would see next.

When we got back to the car and headed back toward the freeway we went past another crazy person's place.  Coyote's Flying Saucer  Retrievals and Repair Service.

We continued on our way and we will send more info shortly.

Make every day a good one!!

Tom & Suzie