Jan 3rd - Las Vegas, NV >> Needles, CA >> Kingman, AZ
Driving Route:
Las Vegas, NV weather: 57/37
Needles, CA weather: 63/38
Oatman, AZ weather: 57/26
Kingman, AZ weather: 57/26
I’m calling this part of the blog “Escape From Las Vegas.” I’m not going to post it until we are snug (hopefully) in the River House but that’s the basic feel of how I’m going to format it. Assuming I document it for prosperity outside of this log. Lev said not to give up on the idea because it could be turned into a serial someday. Oh. Well, maybe. But only after someone else edits the heck out of it. Homophones and homonyms are from the devil. So is most of the rest of grammar and spelling traps the English language likes to lay out for those of us that struggle just to communicate with the rest of our species. Don’t even get me started on maffs. Geez it has been one of those days.
I’m glad that Lev volunteered to play navigator to my pilot. It took me months to settle on a plan when Benny and I first set out on our original adventure and that was mostly made from a plan Dad and I had made over a number of years. We don’t have years or months to work out a route. We don’t have weeks. We’ve been lucky to have more than a day or two and Lev says he plans to check our draft route each day for any potential problems and to make sure that we don’t miss a potential resource.
The news, regardless of media, says that most people are staying home in lock down by choice despite travel being reopened. Well, you could have fooled me. Just getting south of Vegas and to Needles, CA was a … I was going to say nightmare but it wasn’t. I’m just a little strung out. Our supposedly gluten-free breakfast that we ordered from a food truck must have been contaminated in some way; both Lev and Benny puked off and on until we got to Needles, though they mostly stopped before we got to Kelso, CA and the Mojave National Preserve where I insisted on getting off the road and digging out the Pepto (gluten free version) and making them up some electrolyte drink in Benny Blue.
I was this close to taking them to a walk-in clinic but neither one was running a fever, just washed out and while I reserved judgment, we headed on down the road and they improved with every mile and ever sip of ye ol’ Benny Blue. I’ve been over it and over it in my head and the only thing I can think of is they must have used some kind of wheat-based thickening agent in the smoothie instead of just fruit and plant protein. Or someone reused a blender that had some stuck in the bottom. I have
never had that happen before. I am pretty angry and I’m not sure that “take-out” is going to be on the menu any longer. It made the hamster nearly go nuclear. I couldn’t afford to pull over while traffic was so freaking psychotic this morning; not until Needles. Lev had to handle Benny and there were a few times visions of simply ramming all the asshats on the road floated across my vision. I haven’t felt like this since Benny’s original diagnosis.
Lev thinks I’m overreacting. I know I’m not. He isn’t being obnoxious about it, the opposite. He simply thinks that since it didn’t get as bad as I was worried it was going to get that I should put it aside. I think he has forgotten just how OCD my brain is. With the way things are there is no way I want to see them have to go to a doctor. ERs are the fastest way to get sick in my experience. The new bug, virus, whatever you want to call it is still only being found in DC and NYC here in the States but all it is going to take is one case to escape containment accidentally or on purpose and that safety net is going to shred like bubbles in the wind. And now it is coming out that it isn’t Covid after all but some other Frankenvirus. It isn’t quite as communicable as they thought at first, but it is rough on those that catch it. Except that some are sick but don’t have symptoms and they act like a Typhoid Mary. None of us fall in any of the “at risk” categories currently identified, but I’m still going to play it careful.
I guess I do need to calm down. Especially if I want to finish these notes and then get some sleep. Hopefully getting this log entry in will bleed off some of my OCD.
The final approval for people to start traveling didn’t arrive for us until 7 am. Approvals were issued in stages starting around 4 am so you can guess the road was already a mess by the time we were allowed on it. As we pulled out I saw the RV and the possibly abandoned car off in a lot with several other vehicles. More worrying was there was a fenced in enclosure that wasn’t there when we arrived and there were more than just a few people in there and more than a few had zip-ties keep their hands behind their backs, and a few were zipped tied to other people ankle to ankle. No one would be getting up to speed to run done like that.
I saw National Guard troops working along side the mercs but mostly the two groups seemed to be working separately. Road signs were up all over the place encouraging people to participate in a smooth transition by following the rules. The radio was blasting how one person breaking the rules made it harder on everyone else. Yeah, right. Peer pressure to the max. They kept the exits from the overnight locations reasonably sane but once on the road things really deteriorated.
Lev was already feeling woozy and Benny had sweat on his top lip despite how cool it was less than fifteen minutes down the road … which really wasn’t that far down the road to be honest. I had a bad feeling especially when Lev jerked off his seatbelt and barely made it to the head.
“Lev?!”
After a couple of gasps he said, “Stomach.”
I was thinking food poisoning, but we’d all had the same thing and I never did start getting sick which told me the food had been contaminated in some way. We were moving slow enough that I left Benny in his booster seat and told Lev to get in the platform bed with a pan nearby in case he couldn’t get to the head. I got off the interstate and instead of trying to make Hwy 95 which was bumper to bumper, I took the slower route which turned out to be quicker by going to Kelso, CA and the Mojave National Preserve.
We stopped near the Kelso Depot Visitor Center to freshen up. Benny, poor little guy, tried to make the best of it by reading the sign-thingies and learning the history of the Kelso Depot and the role the Union Pacific Railroad played in the region’s early history.
Just beyond Kelso I picked up the Needles Hwy otherwise known at I40 going east. It wasn’t gridlock but it was close. It started thinning out a bit as people on I40 turned north to Vegas, a direction I definitely was not interested in going. I stopped again at Toprock and then took the detour Lev indicated south to Lake Havasu State Park. Just looking at the water chirked Benny back up and I admit it helped me as well. Lev took some pictures at every stop but didn’t say no to me insisting he sleep in a camp chair for fifteen minutes.
By that time they were both about as normal as they were for the remainder of the day. Me? Not so much. I’m just anxious. I need to get ahold of this. Need to get back to my training. I can do this, but man is the anger difficult to shut off. Had they had more than a small smoothie I might really have had to take Benny to a walk-in for fluid loss.
Today we spent most of the day traveling the longest intact section of Route 66. The highway went through a number of old mining and Route 66 era tourist towns. Although most of these communities became ghost towns, many converted to tourist traps making it one of the more popular stretches of Route 66.
From Vegas the route was barren until we hit the town of Needles on the California / Arizona border. Needles is a relatively large town situated right on the Colorado River, and is a popular spot for boating. The town has a few things to see in the downtown area, including a Harvey House (that isn’t open) and a few signs and murals. We went through the town fast enough, though it was relative to how other traffic was moving. Things were rough. Lev leaned out the window to take some photos and it did not make the hamster happy. I managed to keep my mouth shut, but only just.
According to the guides on the internet the thing people remember most about Needles (especially if visiting in summer) is how hot it gets here. In the summer temps of 110 degrees Fahrenheit are not unusual. We aren’t here then. What I mean is that this isn’t summer, it is winter and the high today in Needles was only 63F. I’m glad even though it meant wearing a jacket most of the day because had Benny and Lev been sweating on top of the puking, dehydration would have been an even bigger problem.
I’ll admit in hindsight there were some neat things about the town … historical buildings, including a number of Route 66 era businesses such as vintage motels, a 1950’s hamburger place (The Burger Hut which was closed), a few neon signs (Route 66 Motel is a good example), former service stations, a train depot, a giant Borax wagon, and El Garces, a former Harvey House hotel dating back to 1908. Harvey Houses were a kind of food/hotel set up for travelers, sorta like an early Holiday Inn or Best Western I guess. They were a big thing in their time from what Lev told me who knew about them from some other project he worked on.
Toprock was neat as well with an arched bridge here called the Old Trails Bridge which once carried traffic over the Colorado River from around 1916 to 1947. Today it is only used as a pipeline bridge with a newer bridge for road traffic.
After crossing into Arizona, we were on one of the most beautiful stretches of all of Route 66, or so say the guides. We were heading towards Oatman, and had crazy good views of the Black Mountains. The big mountains really hugged the road.
This was where we took the detour to Lake Havasu City to see the 1831 London Bridge. The bridge was purchased by millionaire Robert P McCulloch from the City of London and rebuilt piece by piece in Arizona in 1971. This was about a 35-mile detour south on Highway 95 between Oatman and Topock. Coming back the way we’d detoured gave Lev a chance to take a few more photos and then out of nowhere popped up the small town of Oatman.
Oatman’s downtown looks like something out of a cowboy movie. There were even feral donkeys roaming the street. Benny was laughing (thank you Creator), Lev was clicking away with his camera, and I was thinking we’d entered the Twilight Zone, especially when Lev told me to pull over so we could get out and wander around. We went into the old mine, visited the jail, and then grabbed drinks at the famous Oatman Hotel.
No, I wasn’t happy about that, but Lev said I needed to have some faith. Yeah. Right. Sorry but I don’t have much faith in my fellow man (or woman) and I only let Benny have clear liquids until supper time. I guess I must admit that the hotel looked like it had good bar food, but we weren’t partaking so I can’t say for sure. The inside was covered in old paper dollar bills, which was pretty crazy to see. They had the accessible ones covered by sheets of plexiglass and I heard people whispering that it was because people were starting to steal them. Best trivia for the town is that it is where those old hollyweird stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard got married and spent their honeymoon night at the Kingman Biltmore in room 1201.
We also learned that Carole Lombard is considered the first female casualty of WW2 due to her death (as well as her mother’s, the best man at her wedding, and twelve service members on their way to training in California) when the plane she was in crashed into a mountain near Vegas due to pilot error. All twenty-two people aboard perished, and it is said that Clark Gable was never the same after she died. Ugh. A hundred years and more ago and it still makes people weepy when told by a master storyteller, which the man at the hotel was.
While we looked around, we learned that Oatman is a former gold mining town that used to be a bustling place back in the 1920s to 1940s. When the mines closed, and the interstates started to be built, it turned into a “ghost town” slash tourist trap. We almost got trapped when they had some really weird cowboy show in the middle of the road. The donkeys were all very prosaic about the noise and that’s because while they are feral, they are descendants of the ones that once worked the mines.
After lots …
lots … of pictures of the donkeys we headed out of town and the road turned curvy and climbed up into the hills and was a hazardous part of the route back in the early days. One of the stories we heard was in those early days, locals made good money being hired to drive that section for visitors. Once we made it over the summit, it was downhill with some fantastic views to give us motivation to keep going.
As we made our way down the mountain, we stopped at this little outpost kinda place called Cold Springs. It is basically a tourist trap but when doing Route 66, it is apparently one of
the places to stop. It is a store and gas station and appears on a lot of postcards from the area. After fuel the best part was the views as we were surrounded by mountains.
The place was originally built in the 1920s but burned down in the 1960s. It was rebuilt in ’04 with modern fuel pumps designed to look vintage. In fact, the entire place looked “vintage” and was, just not as vintage as they wanted you to think it was.
Finally, after another 40-minute drive, we made it to Kingman but the sun had set. Lev had been on the phone all day making sure that our reservation for the Kingman KOA didn’t get given away. They held one spot for us but admitted that there were a lot of angry people they had to turn away over it.
Well tough I wanted to say, we’d paid for the spot in advance, but I kept my mouth shut and allowed Lev to handle it. He’s gotten good at the diplomacy thing. I felt bad that after the day he’d had he had to be the one to do it, which just added to my hamster doing the hillbilly rock stomp in my brain.
I’m better than this. I know I am. And I suppose using Lev and Benny being sick this morning as an excuse for the feral hamster isn’t fair or smart. I need to do better. I will do better tomorrow. I told Lev so and he said not to get so worked up, that everyone has an off day, and he understood that I got rattled because Benny got sick.
Ha! (Looks like I am going to use Lev’s “laugh” when possible). The truth is it was
both of them getting sick, added to my anger of how it must have happened, and my guilt (I admit it) because I’d been too damn lazy to get breakfast going on time. I’ve had it too easy since the Florida Assignment and how our life had to be even before then. Time to tighten things up and stop acting like it is still vacation time. The world acts like it wants to go crazy more than usual. That means I gotta keep my crazy in check better.
We drove around town looking at the neon signs then finally got the okay that the gates at the KOA had been cleared and we could come in. Nice place but a truly weird vibe, like everyone was shook up and waiting for the next shoe to drop. It almost felt like a refugee camp and everyone was expecting the bombs to start at any moment.
Wasn’t a ton of amenities inside the KOA, some of it due to the season, but what they did have is what I needed. Laundry. Geez some of our stuff was so stank they could have walked around on their own. I’ve been airing stuff out as I can but at some point all of the dirt, grim, and stink starts combining and wants to go nuclear. Nasty.
There was also a grocery store onsite. I was warned not to try and hit the local grocery stores because one, they closed at sunset, and two, they were rationing and it was locals-only and you had to have recent proof of residency like a utility bill; property tax bills weren’t being accepted because they had a lot of part-time residents in the county. That’s given me something to worry about. Lev thinks we should keep “proof” of our route by having receipts from various places. He’d planned on getting small debit card receipts from groceries along the way but stocking up using cash and keeping that separate. Just enough to make us look legit without making us look suspicious. Where he got that idea … and why … again makes me wonder what those early assignments of his really were. I don’t disagree with his strategy, but if rationing is going into effect, we will need to take that into account.
I bought a dozen eggs and a half dozen hard boiled eggs. I also got some cheese and they had gluten-free rice cakes which was the only thing in the store specifically labeled that way. Nothing else tempted me. I need to be cautious in my choices and in our money from here on out. The prices weren’t as bad as they had been in Micronesia, but they were bad compared to what prices had been before we started the Alaska Assignment. There might have been some price gouging taking place. I suppose I’ll figure out tomorrow how pervasive that is.
Lev and I are keeping an eye on the inventory. Between what we were able to save from the Alaska Assignment – probably not as much as we would have if we’d thought the world was going to go friggin’ nuts – plus some luxuries from the Pacific Assignment and Caribbean Assignment plus what Lev had ordered on his own plus all the odds and ends that were in the van and what we’ve been able to get since … The God’s honest truth is that we are a lot better off than a lot of people on the road trying to get from Point A to Point B. The problem we can’t figure out is how we compare to when those same people get to their home port. Though maybe we shouldn’t worry about that so much as how we are doing once we finally reach our own home port. We’ve still got a long way to go before we can get off the road. And once we do that is going to present a whole bunch of new challenges.
The weather is a lot cooler than I expected. No snow, nothing like the Alaskan backcountry, but it is expected to get down to 27F tonight. The three of us are going to share the platform bed, plus I hope that keeps Benny from having nightmares. Used to be having gluten would trigger some pretty bad ones. Lev is a restless sleeper when his stomach has been upset, I remember that much from Florida.
I can’t put it off any longer. I’m just going to have to drink a caffeinated water to knock the hamster out. Lev says he plans to help drive but I want to see how he feels before saying that is a sure thing. I’d rather see him taking photos and working with Benny. We’ll see. I’m saying that a lot lately.
Resources:
Route 66 Maps
Route 66 - Google My Maps
https://www.route66-map.com/
https://koa.com/campgrounds/kingman/
is from St. Croix so Gus doesn't need to feel bad. I made up for her and a few other ladies.
