We rolled into Bullhead City, AZ shortly after noon yesterday, June 24th, 2007. Carol and Ben have been wonderful hosts ever since. Yesterday after getting dehydrated and unpacking the car we headed off with them as our tour guides through the desert. Our first stop was in Oatman.
Oatman is a little, but very eccentric, town in the hills. In Oatman we had a very enjoyable lunch at the old hotel in town. Delicious burgers and Burro Ears, which are homemade potato chips. Why are they called Burro Ears you ask, well for the same reason our next purchase was a bag of carrots. You see in Oatman, the Burros the wander freely through town have the right of way not the cars or the pedestrians. I have some great photos of Kevin feeding Liberty, one of the pregnant Burros. We did a bit of souvenir hunting and watched a gunfight in the middle of town. (I have video of the gun fight, we’ll see if Kevin can load that on here as well.)
After our tour of Oatman our guides took us on Route 66 so we could get our kicks! Along which we found a “christmas tree” that has lost some of its decorations, so I graciously replaced them on some of the bare branches. As it turns out there is a contest along Rt 66 where people decorate the trees with holiday ornaments, and some don’t get undecorated!
We drove back along the mountain ridge past some fourwheeling (out here they are called Quad’s) havens full of paths and jumps. And then down through the marsh! Can you believe there is a marsh in Arizona, it is man made but the green growth is spectacular none the less among all the brown. From there we headed across the California border into Needles, CA. Here we got to watch one of Kevin’s favorite things… trains roll through the old station. Ben knew a lot of the history and we enjoyed learning, watching and listening to the trains. After which we hit up a Dairy Queen for some ice cream and to restock on drinks, it being 111* in the shade and all.
Since we had already driven that far and seen California and all we decided London wouldn’t be too much further. So we went and saw the London Bridge. Built in 1831 to cross the Thames River, by the early 1960’s the traffic flow was starting to stress it out. British government decided to sell the bridge and for ,460,000 dollars Robert McCulloch had the winning bid. The bridge was dismantled piece by piece, each one numbered and reassembled on Lake Havasu. I took photos in amazement at the awesomeness, Kevin got coffee.
By this point we were all getting pretty worn out, at temperatures above 110 all day who could blame us. So we stopped by the grocery store for some dinner fixings and enjoyed grilled chicken and vegetables and Carol’s delicious Potato Salad.
OK by now I think we’ve successfully updated you all on the happenings up till today.
This morning we got out of bed at about 6:30 am (by the way Arizona is on MST however they do not observe daylight saving time so at the moment they really seem like they are on PST). Enjoyed our breakfast, lathered on the sunblock and mounted Ben and Carol’s quad’s. We drove up the road to meet up with Pete Sias, Ben’s niece’s husband. He very graciously offered to be our tour guide through the desert this am. The three of us headed off into the desert heat. He showed us what looks like left over Indian formations and we followed wild Burro dung across the sand, through the drainage system over the mountains until we arrived at an abandoned gold mine. The mine was shut down in 2005 (which means there is still gold there!!) when the price fell and the company wasn’t able to mine enough to break even. Armed with flashlights and our trusty guide Pete we entered the mine shaft to explore. An hour later we emerged in awe at the amazing craftmanship and man and steam power needed to dig out soo much of the mountain. We have some fantastic shots inside the mine of us and the bats that accompanied us.
By this point Kevin was getting a little more comfortable on the Quad and we had fun racing back and forth across the Arizona sand with Pete. We saw lizards, bees, bats, Jackrabbits and a variety of other animals. Unfortunately the Arizona sand kicks up quite well behind the quads resulting in a VERY DIRTY Kevin and Kelsey.
We are having a wonderful time on our trip and hope you are all enjoying the blogs along the way, this evening we will head North to visit with Lennae and Jim for the rest of the week. At the moment we are working on transferring an loading the pictures we have taken. Enjoy and talk to you all again soon.
P.S. We love getting messages on the guestbook. Thanks so much!