Ghosting Ourselves
The last day of our Wild West Tour starts at the Grand Canyon and heads west for 200 miles near Bullhead City to a little town in the Black Mountains called Oatman. Oatman is a small mining town that was only incorporated in 1915 after a small gold find by a couple of lucky prospectors. That means that this little town was not really a part of the original Wild West of the mid and late Nineteenth Century. But Oatman was part of the Wild West of the Twentieth Century as it sits on the route of the “Mother Road”, Route 66. We will head south on the Grand Canyon Highway to Route 40, one of the two most popular transcontinental interstate highways. Route 40 tracks the old Route 66 across much of Arizona, right up until it gets close to Oatman. There, Route 40 loops south around Oatman as it heads west to Needles, effectively circumnavigating the entirety of the Black Mountains.
Well, this morning (Friday), we are confronted with a day governed by scorching heat. Oatman will get to 106 degrees today and by backtracking to stay in Kingman, we will be in that or higher heat there, not to mention that Kingman will be a rather weak ending to our great roadtrip. So, we have called an audible and decided that we will drive to Oatman as planned, we will channel as much Route 66 thinking and memorializing as we can all the way. I will look for a Route 66 t-shirt just to make myself feel better about this bit of bad trip planning. Kim even thinks we all need to get a Route 66 t-shirt to take a picture of ourselves in Oatman to turn our travel lemons into some lemonade. After the scheduled Wild West shootout on Oatman’s Main Street at 1:30pm (the high heat moment of the day!), we will get into our dirty white church van and hope like hell that the air conditioning holds up as well as it has so far for the five hour run home through Palm Springs. It’s been a long trip and the heat has both helped (with reduced crowds) and hurt, like when the girls hiked in 98 degree desert heat yesterday. It’s been a great trip, but we are wrung out. It’s worth it to cancel our reservation in Kingman without refund and wake up tomorrow morning on our hilltop. I can return the dirty white church van and the world will go back more or less to normal. It is in the low 90’s there, but 60’s at night, so more or less tolerable.
We wanted to end our trip with a ghost town and we will be doing just that by ghosting the final overnight of what has otherwise been a great western roadtrip that has allowed us to show our granddaughters the wonders of the Southwest as we have come to know them. I have also been chasing my tail writing these stories of our travels as I have tried to be present with my family, keeping several expert witness balls in the air while I’m away from the fray, manage the personal challenges of chauffeuring a big dirty white church van through four big states, and dealing with two of my long-time bugaboos of extreme heat and sleeping at altitude (we’ve been between 6,000 – 9,000 feet in altitude every day). In a word, I have to admit to being a bit tired and in need of my own bed and 1,700 foot hilltop comforts (including my hot tub).
Therefore, since I don’t anticipate lots of excitement in a long hot drive today, even with a ghost town along the way, I am going to make this a short story for the day and use the weekend to get my writing mojo back to normal. In the meantime I and we will all be focused today on ghosting ourselves home.
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P.S.
Inevitably, the day was not quite as uneventful as I expected and I am compelled to add this note to this otherwise shorter-than-normal story. We started the day perfectly on schedule and on plan by driving to Oatman. But everything changed when we got to Kingman and got off Rt.40, the modern-day Rt.66. We got on the Oatman Highway not suspecting anything more eventful than a dusty old road through the desert with regular Historic Rt. 66 signs to make you feel special as you travel. But then the road narrowed and started up the craggy hills of the Black Mountains. That dusty desert road turned into an amazing mountain road with world class twists and turns and cliffhanging moments since this two-way strip of asphalt could only realistically fit 1.75 vehicles unless one pulls off onto the very narrow shoulders. In more than a few points there simply was no shoulder on either side with a precipitous cliff with no guardrail and and uphill rock wall that looked to be in a continuous state of crumbling onto the roadbed. I told Kim that the only thing I would rather not drive on that road than the dirty white church van that I was driving, would have been a motorcycle. But it was an amazingly beautiful and exciting road nonetheless.
After 22 miles of that thrill, we pulled into a little ramshackle mining town that looked like a cross between a Wild West ghost town and an old mining town that was trying to be Park City but falling woefully downscale. In its own way, Oatman’s authenticity is its most charming asset. There are a dozen general variety/souvenir stores, one gem/silver jewelry store (that was actually quite nice) and one eatery in the old Oatman Hotel, where Clark Gable and Carol Lombard spent their honeymoon ninety years ago. The noteworthy thing about Oatman is that there a few dozen burros wandering freely around the town, on the street, on the wooden sidewalks and even in the stores. Despite the obvious soiling that free range burros entail, its all very…authentic and charming. Oatman and the Oatman Highway are worth the trip for anyone doing a Western swing.
Then we headed out through the Mojave desert towards Palm Desert. That was basically a lot of straight narrow roads with lots of trucks traveling at speed. It did occur to me that the 40-mile stretches without services or civilization of any kind was probably what the original Rt. 66 was like for the length of Tulsa to Los Angeles in its day. That really must have made traveling cross-country a true adventure. I had the feeling that the entire trucking band of brothers were making time on these back roads to get home for the weekend. Then, when we started from Palm Desert to go up an over the hill to Anza and eventually Aguanga, we had the same TGIF effect but with whatever gig workers that work in Palm Springs and have to go home to San Diego every week. Nevertheless, from my call with my sister, Kathy, who was inching along on the 15 through the San Bernadino Pass, there are worse ways to get home after a long trip on a Friday afternoon. At the end of our trip we stopped at the Temecula McDonalds to get the girls their Happy Meal dinners. I will save that story for tomorrow, because it is worthy of an entire blog story.