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
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