Beep Beep - the road runner makes an appearance

Back to the heat! We left Julian this morning with hope for many things: cell phone, wireless modem, nice weather, cable TV, and a great campground. We did get a cell phone signal although it breaks up. The wireless modem connects but does not work. The campground is marginal although it sits up on a hill overlooking Laughlin Nevada. We did get cable TV but it is limited to local channels, a religious channel, CNN and a business channel. I wanted ESPN, TBS, Speed and the food channel. I lose again. Oh, did I mention that the temperature was 120 when we arrived at 5:30. There was no one in the office so we had to set up in one of the temporary sites. That means that we will have to move tomorrow into a permanent (at least for the week) site.

When we broke camp this morning, it was 83 degrees up on the ridge. When we got down into the main part of the campground, it was 92 degrees and before we left Julian we watched the thermometer rise past 100 degrees where it stayed the rest of the day rising slowly until it reached 120 where it remains to this moment (8:50) Mountain Time. We have started home and have left our first time zone behind (though we will move in and out as we move into and out of Nevada). We have both air conditioners going and we haven’t gotten cold yet. I think we will sleep with it going unless the temperature falls off rapidly.

Last night, I had trouble sleeping (again). I went to sleep quickly but woke at 3. I was hot and had trouble breathing. Breathing was harder and harder as the week went on. At one point, I took an antihistamine but all it did was make me dizzy (and no improvement in the breathing). Saturday night I woke in the middle of the night and never did go back to sleep. Last night, I opened the window and some cool air came in but it didn’t help. I was really stuffed up to the point where I was anxious and uncomfortable. Finally, I got up and went outside and looked at the stars. The night was cool but there was a lot of haze in the sky. I sat out for nearly an hour and finally went back inside. I woke Cheryl and we turned everything around in case the bed tilted the wrong way (doubtful but desperate). That didn’t help so we turned on the air conditioner not so much for cooling but for clearing the air. Within 20 minutes we were both asleep. I think the smoke in the air was the culprit. Once we air conditioned the air, I went right to sleep and woke with my head clear for the first time all week. Hmmmm!

We drove back the same way we came into Julian. It was much better going down hill than up. We drove through the desert again. The desert is really beautiful but hot, hot, hot. 111 through that particular desert, a harbinger of things to come. There is a state park out in the desert. You can camp there in the desert and drive your desert sand vehicles (dune buggies, dirt bikes etc). When we came through the first time, there was no sign of campers there but this time we saw a few. It really looked strange to see a fifth wheel trailer out in the middle of the desert. One particular camping area had picnic tables with sun covers over them.

We passed a couple of towns with new housing developments. There were no lawns at any of the places. Mostly they had sand or gravel areas with either palm trees or plantings of cactus. A couple had stones making them look like a river bed. We drove by the Salton Sea again. Someone at KQ Ranch told us that they had used this sea as a threat to their kids. “If you don’t behave, we will take you camping at the Salton Sea!” It is a salt water enclosed body of water and apparently has a sulphurous smell to it. Whatever it had, it seemed to work.

We took one shortcut north of the Salton Sea. We took an unnumbered road that cut off a large chunk of territory. The road we were on went northwest to meet up with I 10. The shortcut went northeast and met up with 10 several exits east of our other route. Guess what, another desert. This one had a lot of uplifted sedimentary rock, dark grey in color and soft looking in texture. We climbed for several miles and the road was winding and narrow (seems to be a theme in this part of the country). It was quite pretty in a southwest sort of way albeit it was dark grey instead of the usual browns, reds and yellows.

The directions from the campground were a little confusing. They talked like each instruction was right on top of each other rather than lots of miles apart. The instructions to get out of Needles were totally bizarre. We found all the right roads but they weren’t the right roads. K Street was the biggest culprit. We went down Broadway as per instructions and found K Street. It was one block long and didn’t go anywhere off either end. We circled the block 3 times and finally saw a sign that you would only see coming into Broadway from the wrong direction that pointed us to Laughlin. We followed that and lo and behold, found another K street in another part of town. Eventually, we found Bullhead, City and its 120 degrees. The sign for the campground was right at the road in the middle of a downhill run and was small. We saw it as we passed it and found ourselves on the horns of the usual dilemma. Where do we turn around?

Eventually, we got back to the campground at roughly 5:30 and found the office (that stays open until 8) closed and locked up tight. We found a place to put our trailer, off loaded the car and took a campsite right across from the office. Cheryl had another attack of the heat heebie jeebies and retired to the camper under full air conditioning with a bottle of water in her hand. I hooked up the electricity (so the a/c would work) and then the water. I left the sewer because I figured that we would have to move the next day when we finally registered. We have a banking behind the camper and a couple of trees that provide some late day shade. There is a dip in the banking that gives us a view of Casino Row in Laughlin right across the Colorado River. We are in Arizona but we look right into Nevada.

We dutifully changed our clocks only to find out this morning that Arizona does not change to Daylight Saving Time so they are the same time as California and Nevada. So this morning we changed all our clocks back to California time.

Fortunately we have 50 amp electric service. This means that we can run both of our A/Cs at the same time. It took quite some time to get the ambient temp of our coach down to a reasonable level. At 11:30 (mountain daylight savings time, which by the way has no real relationship to the real time) the temperature outside was still 107. At 6:30 this morning (also by the wrong time) it was 93 and broke 100 degrees at around 8 (actual time). Are you confused by this time thing yet? I guess I always thought that when we went onto DST, everyone went with us (except of course, Hawaii, they don’t do anything like the rest of us and for good reason).

Well, I have to make breakfast and then make sure all of the clocks read the same. It doesn’t have to be right; it just has to be the same.

We met someone out at the pool when we were making an exploratory tour around the joint. He said that Laughlin has a big fireworks display that they shoot up from the river. He says the best place to watch it is from the pool. Sounds great to me. We were planning on going up to Las Vegas for their fireworks but we might just stay here. An Indian casino down the road has fireworks the next night. That one is still up in the air.

We just went to do some grocery shopping. We found a nice looking Safeway. They had a Starbucks also so we figured that we couldn’t lose. The door opened into a fruit display. We bought a couple of pieces of a couple of fruits. Then a sale banner caught my eye. It was for various 12 packs of soda and we were about out. It said buy 2 get 3 free. Upon closer inspection, it clearly (in very small print) said you have to have the store discount card and that the regular price of the soda was 5.95 a 12 pack (5.95??). Whoa! Upon close inspection, pretty much everything in the store had 2 prices. A fairly moderate price if you have the store card and a ridiculously high price if you don’t have the card.

We put everything back and headed for the Starbucks to get a coffee and figure out what to do next. Cheryl got an iced coffee but when I asked what kinds of coffee they had brewed, I was told breakfast blend. Breakfast blend?? I come to Starbucks to get a specialized coffee that I can’t get anywhere. That is all you have brewed? They suggested that I get one of the $5.00 expresso blend coffees (you know, the ones that have several shots of sugar syrups in them). I just told them no thanks. I think they are catering to a different crowd than usually populates a Starbucks.

We headed for the door and walked right by the customer service desk. There was a 5 person line there but it seemed that they were getting Powerball tickets so I though I would find out what you had to do to get the store card. It looked like a nice store and I hated to go out into the heat (111 by 11 am). They had a simple form to fill out and I was given a discount card right on the spot.

We got our cart back and headed into the store. We bought some really nice looking fruit, milk, eggs, a frozen pizza and 5 12 packs of various kinds of soda. We headed back onto the road and checked out a couple of parks along the Colorado that we might try later in the week. Then we went to the GMC garage to talk to them about our ailing truck. They were really nice but don’t work on trucks like mine. Their idea of a GMC truck is a SUV. They did suggest a Chevy garage in Las Vegas that specializes in medium duty trucks. Now I have to figure out how to get there. Do I uproot from here for a day and drive the 1 ½ hours up there or should I Change my schedule around a little and spend a couple of days up there? I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

We came back to camp, put away the groceries and went to visit our favorite campground desk manager who was happy to let us change sites. She had told us earlier that she had friends who had Sprint and had no trouble with their phones here. We can get out with the phone but the sprint computer wireless modem is not so fortunate. We ended up wandering all around the campground with our phone checking out the signal. We found some sites where we had almost no signal at all and then we found a few sites that had a full array of signal bars. It all had to do with the placement of the sand bankings. We had 2 bars where we were but if we moved about 150 feet up a hill, we had 5 full bars and a great signal. Not only that but this site has a great view of Casino row over in Laughlin and a fairly constant breeze. We moved!

We are now on the top of the hill looking into the Colorado River Valley and its plethora of casinos. Now if we can just get some cool weather to sit out in. Cheryl was reading a brochure that said that this area averages 4 inches of rain a year (when they get it, it usually causes flash floods because it comes all at once).

We ate the frozen pizza for lunch since it thawed out in the few minutes it took us to get back. I fired up the oven for the first time on this trip and probably won’t fire it up again for a long time. Even with both of the air conditioners running, it heated up the entire coach. The a/cs are struggling to get it back down to a regular temperature. I haven’t looked recently but I am betting we hit the 120 mark again. It feels like it. We are getting used to guessing what the temperature is. We tell people we are after the southwest experience and 120 degrees day after day is part of that experience (we did expect hot but I am sure we didn’t expect this).

The temperature got up to 122 in the afternoon. We went shopping again to pick up the things we forgot in the morning. We ran into another great Walmart (Cheryl tells me that I spell Wallmart wrong). This was a huge supercenter. It may not have been 2 stories but it was still huge. The people in it were friendly and the merchandise was actually inviting. The fresh food looked good and the deli had some good deals. We did look at some electronics that didn’t look as fresh and up to date as the things at Best Buy but the store had a huge food department. They also had a McDonalds and they had ice cream cones for $.59. There was a pretty good line and everyone was buying the cones. Half the people in the store were eating ice cream cones.

I must have been pretty beat (probably from the heat). I lost interest in a rerun of my favorite show (NCIS) and went to bed at 8:30. I slept until almost 8 am. When I got up, I made a pot of coffee and we sat out on our patio drinking coffee and watching the planes land at the airport right across the road. They were mostly small planes but the occasional Gulfstream and a couple of large airliners set down while we were watching. Eventually, we sat down and went through our mail then reviewed our schedule. We wanted to change it and head to Las Vegas next week. There is a Chevy dealer that works on medium duty trucks so we made an appointment (of sorts) to have the water and oil pressure problems checked. We will also make an appointment to have the coverings on our slides changed as they have begun to disintegrate. Never a dull moment.

Then we made wholesale changes in our schedule. We got a run of 3 nights in the park at the Grand Canyon so we shuffled everything around and added Monument Valley and Sedona to the schedule. We will augment our Grand Canyon time with some added days at a campground outside the park. Then we will head down through Arizona to New Mexico and make our way into Texas.

While we were sitting out this morning, I watched this bird come up the hill at a rather good clip. He (she) stopped at the back of our trailer and just looked at us. He must have stared at us for 4 or 5 minutes before he set out running down the row of campsites. This was our introduction to the great American cartoon character….The Roadrunner! There was no Wiley Coyote chasing him but you could see the resemblance to the cartoon character. Later in the day, we saw another who headed in the same direction. He went underneath another camper and met up with what seemed to be our morning visitor. Later, we headed down to the laundry to do our washing and there was another outside the laundry.

While the clothes were drying, we headed over to the pool. The water was slightly cool but certainly not cold but since the air was 122, the water felt really refreshing. The sun was very bright and the patio and railing were really hot to the touch.

After picking up and folding the clothes, we considered cooking out to keep the camper from getting hot from cooking but it was way too hot to cook out and we don’t have a picnic table to set up on so in the house we went.

Well, tomorrow we will check out Oatman and see what develops from there. See you all again tomorrow night.

Clayton & Cheryl