Gettin' our kicks on Route 66!

Day 8: Saturday, March 25, 2016

Today we visited the desert.  We’ve been in the desert for a little while, but today we came to appreciate it.  We started the day a little lazy, but we finally made our way to Oatman, AZ, the ghost town that just won't die.  Oatman is down the original Route 66 alignment.  It’s a crazy, twisty, turny road through some mountains, complete with the remains of an ancient car wreck where someone missed a switchback, and I was really glad I had my Lewis and Clark Bands.  (These, by the way, were the best investment of the whole trip.  I bought child-sized SeaBands for Jack, who also gets violently car sick, but I got these Lewis and Clark bands for myself because they have adjustable Velcro and I have tiny wrists. I have not been sick once this entire trip, and I should have been sick all day most every day.  I highly recommend them!) When we arrived there, Aunt Gale and Uncle Mikey in tow, we found the town was about a block long, but it was filled with enough people for at least 3 city blocks.  It was a lot of fun.  There was a (fake) shoot out in the street as the Wells Fargo was “robbed” by an outlaw.  There were wild burros roaming the streets looking for and receiving treats pretty much every 3 feet because there was always someone willing to feed them. And there were giant ice cream cones.  There’s no way to go wrong on a stop like that.



Our next stop was to London Bridge in Lake Havasu City.  This is something Jackson had learned about somewhere and just HAD to see. The real, actual, honest-to-god London Bridge currently resides in a city in the Arizona desert.  A businessman was building a town in the desert, and he wanted to convince people to go there.  So, when he heard that the London Bridge was for sale because it was sinking into the Thames, he went to London, bought the bridge, and had it taken apart brick by brick, numbered, loaded onto barges, sailed from London to California, and then had it brought to the desert by rail where it was meticulously reassembled using the number system devised in taking it apart.  Now it stands in the middle of the desert for tourists to marvel at and weird water-powered hover board riders to perform tricks under. Uncle Mikey even discovered the cache we were after, his first find!
Our last stop of the day was to visit some REAL desert at a piece of property Aunt Gale owns.  Driving by, the desert looks monotonous and dead.  Up close and personal, it is a completely different experience.  In the shade of a mountain, we found blooming cacti, giant Joshua Trees, soaring saguaros, and all sorts of life underfoot.  Her property is home to a matate, which ancient Native Americans used to grind corn and other grains into flour.  More interestingly, it is home to a military plane wreck from the 1960s.  Two planes were practicing some sort of maneuver over the desert when they collided.  I believe the story goes that one was able to limp back to the base, but the other spiraled out of control and broke apart in the air, half landing farther up the mountain where we were not prepared to climb and the rest landing farther down where we were able to inspect it.  Both the pilot and copilot were able to safely eject (though I wonder how safely they were able to land considering the landscape!) and there were no fatalities, but the wreckage remains and the boys had a really great time finding springs and wires and pieces of glass and melted metal. A little boy's dreamland! Of course, it was a mother's nightmare.

Everywhere you look, teddy bear cholla chunks littered the ground, and other cacti lurked around every corner, just waiting for an unsuspecting little boy to forget to watch where he was walking and run right into them. In fact, at one point, Tucker and Max both had cacti stuck to the bottom of their shoes and Tucker had spikes going clear through his shoes, and then while we were dealing with that situation, Jack took a bad step and slipped down a hill, ending up with cactus spines in him, as well! Never a dull moment! 

All in all, it was a really great day. We got to see some pretty cool stuff, and it was a lot of fun hanging out with Aunt Gale and Uncle Mikey.