Vegas…still getting over it…will post our experiences in the next couple of days….Rosie is till gathering her thoughts on that one….
Leaving Vegas was easy and the Hoover Dam was only about a half hour drive away, we went over the top of the dam and all cars and buses were given the once over by security staff, they have built a beautifully arched concrete bypass bridge to cut the inconvenience time of the ‘non’ dawdling tourist.
Above is Lake Mead, the water at the back of the dam, this is another huge horizon picture, the Lake is enormous, it has a floating marina for when the lake rises and falls. Above is the dam….Rosie is putting the blame kind of on the Operator for this poor representation of the dam by not showing the bottom in the photo….we were being a little cheap and didn’t want to pay the $8.00 parking fee for one photo….so the Operator pulls illegally to the side of the road, jumps out of the car ‘pass me the camera Rosie I’m quicker than you’ runs to the edge of the embankment snaps a photo, jumps back in and roars off…Rosie looks at the photo and asks ‘where is the bottom of the dam?’ Operator answers ‘a hell of a long way down..’ Well, I suppose it is the tallest dam in the world. The bottom left is the water intakes for the turbines, it is a seamless looking operation, all is built perfectly into the canyon. The dam controls the mighty Colorado River by preventing flooding and irrigates 1 million acres of land in the US.
The road still rolls on and Rosie and the Operator went with it, out into the desert and back in time to the days of the Great Depression when migrants were escaping the poverty of the barren prairie dust bowls of Illinois and travelling to California to seek their fortune and a better life. After WW2 Americans used this ‘Mother Road’ to flaunt their new found wealth and get their kicks on Route 66 in their new convertibles and jalopies, the road boomed with cafes, motels and bars springing up everywhere….the business eventually started disappearing when the interstate freeways were developed and Route 66 ceased to exist…ghost towns and tumbled down business now co exist with some pristine restored hints of the past.
Our journey on the Mother Road started in Kingman, we went to the Route 66 information centre and this is where we first encountered the passionate old timers that keep this route alive. They lived and breathed the journeys, the tails and the restorations. Route 66 is an icon and very much alive! We digested all the information we were given and then went for breakfast at Mr Ds Diner. This is one
of the classic 60s restorations that are thriving along the route. This was one of the
cheapest brekkies we have
had as well…$5.50 for the bottomless cup of coffee and a full cooked.
The train is the Santa Fe Steam engine, it ran ten return trips a month between Kansas City and LA hauling passengers and freight, Kingman was a water stop for the train back in the day. It began its journeys in 1928 as a coal fired steam engine and was converted to an oil fired engine in 1936. The Santa Fe did its last trip in 1953 and over its years of service had done over 2,500,000 miles. This machine is huge, solid and heavy, what a beauty.
We were in Arizona, this is cowboy country, the landscape you see in every TV Western, the ground was rocky, there were rocky canyons and rocky lookout pinnacles and Route 66 was a winding, cracking, bumpy snake..it was a beautiful road….how could you opt for an 8 lane interstate? Rosie did utter that statement without a trace of cynicism! It was only a 28 mile drive to Oatman…this was the most hillybilly wild west town we have been too and, it was in the middle of no where.
This is the one horse towns main street…no, wait a minuet they are not horses…they are burros. Yep, Oatman was a tent town in 1906 when gold was discovered, the miners used burros in the mines, these are the direct descendants of the pit burros, they are a ‘wild’ herd and they literally have free range around the town….it was 93F, stinking hot and the town smelled of hot donkey…oops, burro. One cottoned on to Rosie and started making a beeline for her, the gallant Operator intercepted the beast and tried to dissuade it but these animals know the scent of tourist and are a little aggressive, with a practised whack on the rump from the Operator it was off to the next in comer. Oatman declined in 1942 when Congress declared mining was ‘no longer essential to the war effort’…in other words, ‘we need your men to fight’, since then the town has tried to keep it as original to the mining days as possible, resulting in over 500,000 visitors a year.
Oatman is the last stop in Arizona before you enter the Mojave desert the ghost towns are every 10 miles, crumbling buildings turning into desert dust. Its not empty, deserted land though, it is surprising how many homes are there, nothing more than a group of a couple of trailers or solitary trailer camps dotted in the barren landscape.
There are no power cables leading to most of them, they have no fences, and most are packed with junk and rubbish lying all around them….suppose there is no rubbish collection way out here. We did not see any people and you wondered what these loners did out here in the desert, in the heat, in the middle of nowhere where they seemed to have nothing all around them…they did have mail delivery. The term, the mail must get through, has new meaning.
Needles was like an oasis in the desert, albeit a tiny wee one. These old beauties were for sale at $150 bucks a piece…..Rosie would love to take one home! We didnt stop in Needles we wanted to carry on to the legendary oasis of Roys Diner in Amboy about another 60 miles down the road…we were looking forward to a cold beer and maybe a nice bowl of chilli to go with it. The air conditioning was making Rosie and The Operator mighty thirsty, the first beer was gonna taste awesome…thought was given to the first pilgrams forging ahead with their families in this god forsaken land in covered wagons, it would have been hell.
And, like a mirage out of a heat wave there she appeared, the oasis in the desert. What a beautiful 60s frontage that diner was, full length windows a biker outside ready to go in, cars at the garage….but, something didnt seem right….the cafe was a museum, the petrol station sold the most expensive gas in California and that was all it sold…. there was no cafe! The urban Route 66 myth…its called Roys Cafe and not one guidebook or brochure said it was not a real cafe….ripped off big time. Rosies tongue was swollen in her mouth, The Operator cracked a ton all the way to the nearest town of Barstow….another 108 miles away. The six pack bought from the garage that night never tasted so good in the Motel room.
Bet the air was as blue as the sky.