Bullhead City, Arizona – Adios Arizona

As evident from our most recent posting, we were having some fairly severe issues with the coach and coping as best we could.  But I’m very pleased to report that everything has been resolved and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that nothing new emerges to frustrate us or delay our plans, because for the next month we intend to relocate once a week as we inch our way northward.

Thanks to the coach-related problems, we spent most of our two weeks in Bullhead City waiting for phone calls or visits from RV techs, appliance deliverers and installers and assorted other events which kept us “at home”.  That was a good time to get the taxes prepared and in the mail and attend to assorted other minor chores so all was not lost.

As head chef, the biggest event in my life was the installation of a new microwave/convection oven.  The exterior is the same size as the original but new technology allows for a larger interior which means a 9x13 pan can be extracted without third degree burns to one’s fingers.  Since its installation it has been used in the microwave mode and the roasting mode thus far and seems to perform well.  It remains to be seen how it works for cake and cookie baking.

The Laughlin-Bullhead City International Airport, which is just across the highway from the campground, was the scene of an air show featuring many of the WWII-era planes in the collection of the Commemorative Air Force based in Tempe.  The star of the show was “Fifi”, the only remaining operational B-29 Super-fortress.  Perhaps flights were being sold to the general public because she made a number of take-offs and landings all weekend and well into Monday as well before disappearing for good over the horizon.  Wouldn’t that be a great adventure?

On Saturday we decided to make a dash “up the hill” to Kingman to visit the Route 66 Museum.  Having traveled The Mother Road in the early ‘60s from St. Louis to Los Angeles, I’m particularly nostalgic about the lore of the places along the way, although most my own memories are now really vague.  Lost as I was in musings about that long-ago trip, it came as an especially rude shock to return to the parking lot to find the car covered in several inches of heavy wet snow.  In Arizona.  In April.  Isn’t that against the law?  It can’t be said that a white-out was occurring but visibility was not especially good and we had no idea how much longer it might continue so we scrapped plans to visit The Mohave Museum and headed back to Bullhead City.  As soon as we crossed Coyote Pass and began the descent into the valley, the skies cleared and we were again in sunlight and enjoying the spring-like weather.  Snow, when confined to far-off mountains, is an admirable element; up close and personal…not so much.

We had picked up a flyer for a River Cruizers car show at the Avi Casino our final weekend in Bullhead City.  Naturally we assumed the Avi was one of the herd of casinos that crowd the shore of the Colorado in Laughlin.  Not so.  It’s quite a ways downstream.  Luckily Howie had asked for directions (breaking one of the cardinal rules of Guyhood) so we weren’t totally surprised that we had to drive for miles to reach it.  But there were times along the way that we thought we’d taken the wrong road, especially when we stopped seeing signs of civilization.  But, finally, there it was – an enormous complex with a huge array of classic and muscle cars, all that chrome just glittering in the sunlight. 
And what a pretty setting for such a show – the blue Colorado River matching the cars for glitter, huge blue sky, faux beach with white sand and tiki huts.  Hey, it’s a Nevada casino after all so a little sham scenery is to be expected.

 

Here’s a photo of one of my favorites.  This paint job was just amazing and the photo doesn’t begin to do it justice – it was so red that it almost hurt to look directly at it.   It would be a great color for nail polish if one had Dragon Lady fingernails.  We even found a Plymouth Fury convertible with push-button drive similar to my first car.  This one was buttercup yellow, however, and not powder blue.  Most of the cars’ owners were sitting under canopies or under trees, sipping colas and trying to stay cool in the desert heat, but with frequent pop-ups to wipe away imaginary fingerprints with soft cloths kept at the ready.

We also made another trip to visit Oatman, a ghost town and tourist trap.  On our first visit several years ago, we’d taken along a bag of carrots for the town’s herd of burros but this time we decided against it.  There were quite a few very young burros wandering about, some napping in the middle of the road, others just standing around staring into space, but most of them mooching from tourists.  And none too gently if some of the yells from some of the folks were any indication.  Being butted from behind by an insistent burro can come as a surprise.  The Oatman Hotel is notable for the legend that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night there in 1939 – one certainly hopes it was in better repair then than it is now.  So much for Hollywood glamour.

One of our running jokes is that we seem to find these rental RVs everywhere, usually on roads that are barely suitable for Jeep Wranglers much less anything larger.  It’s a bit off-putting to come around a hairpin turn on some winding mountain road and see one of these coming at you, probably driven by someone who hasn’t driven one before and who is “speed touring”.

 
We are currently just north of St. George, Utah where spring has arrived, trees are budding, the grass is green and wildflowers are in bloom.  Stay tuned for next week’s report from here in the land of red rocks.