Happy 4th of July...Oh, is that a fire?

Another day has dawned. I slept really well (for a change). Coffee and blueberry pancakes, do a few dishes, study the maps and head for the car before it gets too hot. It was still over 100 at 9:30 when we hit the road.

We did have one sort of crisis this morning. We realized that by changing our schedule all around, we are sending some of Cheryl’s medicine to the Grand Canyon and we are not going there for nearly a month. This will take a little thinking to resolve. There are some options but we will give it a couple of days to settle.

We headed out for Oatman. We have heard that this is kind of a neat place. It is a ghost town that started out as a gold rush town. They took a lot of gold out of mines in this town but the town was closed up during the war because the government wanted to miners to dig things that were needed for the war effort. Oatman was located on the famous Route 66. It was the last town before the road headed into the Mohave Desert so it was an important stop. Later on, I 40 was built and Route 66 was relegated to the history books. The road was no longer used and Oatman died.

Somewhere later on, Oatman was reborn as a tourist destination. The buildings are all really old and somewhat decrepit but there are lots of antique shops and little “junk” shops, several restaurants, a lot of history and a bunch of color. Did I mention the burros? Back when there was a lot of mining action, most of the minors had burros. As their need for the burros waned, the miners just let them go free. Over several generations, they became wild. When the town was reborn as a tourist site, the burros wandered back into town and they now spend their days begging from the tourists. Almost every store in town sells 1# bags of carrots for a dollar (yes, the same bags you and I buy for $.50). Then the tourists feed the burros or to say it closer to reality, the burros beg, chase, nudge your arm and in some cases even bite you until you feed them. They know the bags of carrots and will follow tourists in droves until all of the carrots are gone (and a rather long time afterwards). The town was fun for a while but the novelty passed in about an hour and a half. We wanted to see the gunfight in the street but we had to wait another 2 hours and frankly, we had already outstayed the interesting part.

Oatman has been used as a backdrop for quite a few movies. How the West Was Won was probably the best known but Universal Soldier also used the town. Their biggest claim to fame was that Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their Honeymoon there! Don’t ask me, I am only the messenger. I had a hard time figuring that one out. Of course, that was before it became a ghost town.

We headed back toward the main road. We turned south and followed the old route 66 through the desert. It was an amazing piece of road. Considering it ran through the desert and there was not a building or tree or anything else there, why did the road have to wind to and fro? You would think they would have just drawn a line and made the road along that line. I’ll bet 5 of the 25 miles were just spent going back and forth.

We headed south toward Lake Havasu City. This is the city or town that bought the London Bridge many years ago and moved it from London to Lake Havasu City and rebuilt it as the centerpiece of the city. They hoped to use it to make the place more desirable and it seems to have worked. They put it over a thoroughfare running between the mainland and a large Island in Lake Havasu. The thoroughfare was just lined with boats and there was an English Themed Village along the water underneath the bridge. It was pretty busy but not as busy as I am sure it is in the winter. This is a big area for the west coast snowbirds. We are here in the off season. Their big time is in the winter. This is the west coasts Florida. People we have talked to here say that in the winter, you can’t get a reservation as the park is always full (one place we tried to make reservations in Yuma closes for the summer). It was 117 there. Not quite the 122 we came back to at camp but still hot none-the-less.

When we got back, we changed and headed right to the pool. We shared it with a bunch of other people today and had a great time getting to know them. One couple lived locally but went on the road for 4 to 8 months each year. They admitted to slowing down a little as they were only going for 2 months this year. We watched the sun set from the pool and wandered back to camp in the dark (well, it wasn’t quite as dark as it seemed since I still had my sunglasses on). The temperature had gone down to 113. The camper however, was a lot more comfortable.

Well, that is today. Tomorrow is the 4th of July. Fireworks over the river between here and Laughlin tomorrow night. We’ll see what other trouble we can get into.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!

We’ll miss the fireworks at Portsmouth…a definite must in our annual schedule. The anniversary of our first date (although it was rained out that year and was held on the day after the 4th rather than the night before the 4th. I think we have gone to the night before the 4th fireworks at Portsmouth every year since we got together. We even went the year we went to Alaska. We left a few days later.

We got up this morning and headed out to the Safeway. They have a 4th of July special; 8 pieces of fried chicken for $5. We bought a sampling of salads (potato, broccoli, and artichoke) visited Starbucks and headed for the beach. We had planned to go to the park just down the road. We visited it the other day and they told us it was $5 a car for the day. This morning, I pulled in as big as life and handed the woman a $5 bill chatting briefly about the weather. She looked at me like I had 2 heads and said since it was 4th of July, it was $40 per person (rather than $5 a car). I looked back at her with as much disbelief as I could muster and mumbled something about the woman the other day telling us it was $5. She said this was the 4th of July and the ticket was good for the whole weekend. I only want to be here one day. She shrugged and I turned around the building and headed down the road the other way.

I had scoped out the entire stretch of road and knew there was a municipal park just a mile away; same town, same sunshine, same 120 degree heat and the same Colorado River…..Nice big parking lot and no…repeat…no charge. There was a huge crowd there and all of the tables were taken but we found a spot between 2 trees where we thought there would be shade all day, set up our own table and put down a couple of chairs and called it home for the day.

We have learned to drink lots and lots of water. You have to if you want to survive this kind of weather. You almost never see anyone walking around without a bottle of water or some other liquid. We have been lucky. We haven’t suffered dehydration yet but you get really tired of drinking bottle after bottle of water. Our Brita pitcher is working overtime filtering water. We have a bunch of quart bottles that we bought just for this occasion and we have used several liter and a half bottles that we picked up when our fridge wasn’t working. The refrigerator is about half full of drinks. We drink water, diet soda and crystal light powder in water.

I remember a summer trip to Watkins Glenn (NY) for a World Sports Car Championship 6 hour endurance race and a Can Am race the next day. The temperature was well over 100 degrees and the humidity was pretty high. There was no place to go swimming since they had floods less than a month before and all of the lakes and swimming holes were polluted by bacteria washed into them from the farms around them. We showed up at the track with 5 cases of beer (this was a long long time ago) and a single case of soda which was gone the first day. That was my first adventure in very hot weather. In 1984, I took my family out to Yellowstone. We spent several days at the Badlands and experienced weather like we have seen here. 118 degree temperatures and a breeze that made you feel like it wasn’t anywhere near that hot. We all started to show signs of dehydration within 3 days and had to try to catch up with the water. It was a painful lesson but one which I have never forgotten.

The park was really nice. The river was full of boats and jetskis. There are at least a dozen places in town to rent jetskis and lots of people brought their own. Then you add boats to that; lots of party (pontoon) boats and great huge boats with great huge engines. It was noisy and the water was always riled up. There were a lot of police boats cruising the river also. We saw at least 4 marked Bullhead City Police and a couple of state patrol boats.

We saw a couple of people dump their jetskis and become separated from them. Someone always rescued them. The river has enough current to carry the rider away from the jetski much faster than the jetski drifted down the river. We even saw the police pull one jetski over to the shore for about a half hour.

We wandered into the water. It was cool; the first cool thing we had experienced that didn’t come out of a refrigerator. The water was very refreshing but we couldn’t stay in it too long. Even with sunscreen, we were starting to burn after only a few minutes. We headed for camp. We dried out just on the walk to the car. There were cars cruising the parking lot looking for a place to park. The lot was chockablock full. We made someone happy.

What’s next? I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out….Just got back from the fireworks. I knew I wouldn’t be happy watching from waaayyy up here so we headed out to try to get closer. No one we asked seemed to know where they would be fired from except that they fire them over the river. We headed down this side of the river and found a parking lot where lots of people were gathering so we pulled in. In about a half hour, up went the fireworks. Way down the river from where we were. All of the people around us were facing a particular area. We figured that we had hit the jackpot and that the fireworks would be right across the river from where we sat.

We and they were wrong. The show was really good but being so far away, it lost some of its impact. I like to sit right under the bursts. If I don’t get a crick in my neck from looking directly up, then I missed the real show. This one was like that. This got a 10.0 for technical accomplishment but a 7 for overall affect. The Russian judge gave them a perfect score and the French Judge refused to give them any score at all.

The whole show was synchronized to music. The music was playing across the river but we could hear it quite well from where we were. After the grand finale, everyone started to get up to leave. We stuck around to let the traffic clear out some and noticed that there was a great fire down the river in the direction of the fireworks. It started out as a small compact fire but grew steadily higher as the things around it caught. Then it started to spread in width and pretty soon a large area was involved and the flames were 40 feet up into the air. I have no idea what burned but it grew fast and became more and more out of control. After 10 minutes they started to knock it down but there were still flames covering a large area. You can see how quickly these fires out here get going.

Everything here is dry and from what we are told, many of the shrubs and bushes here are very oily. There is always a pretty good wind and it takes little to get one of these fires started. We will wander down that way and see what burned in the morning.

It was nearly 10 when we got back and the temperature is still 113. They are predicting hot for Las Vegas next week so it doesn’t look like we will get any kind of break. We did have some clouds today but not many of them. Almost forgot what they look like.

See you tomorrow. We have to go get our mail and will probably check out the Laughlin Casinos.