Needles to Tusayan

Breakfast was back at the restaurant (Juicy's?) that was somehow linked to the hotel and it needs to be noted that they did not have Good Tea. It needs to be noted because I need an excuse for why I almost killed a child aimlessly wandering in a supermarket car park.

We hit the road, aiming to leave the interstate and get onto Route 66. It wasn't much longer than the interstate thanks to much of it being straight and with a 65mph speed limit (which we took under advisement) and a lot more interesting. "Historic" route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles (and vice versa) but now is no longer contiguous and some sections have been transformed into interstates. Route 66 in Arizona is essentially a tourist destination with the small towns along it clearly catering for bikers and motor enthusiasts with a ridiculous number of mechanics along the way.

An orphaned portion of Route 66 took us deeper into Needles where we saw what a small and quiet place it was. We left as soon as we could, back onto the interstate and then off onto the long portion of Route 66 running from Needles to Seligman.

Immediately on exiting the interstate, we were faced with a stunning spectacle of the desert landscape. And also the sign "Mile 1".

We drove on with the mile signs incrementing and desert landscape on either side. Some portions were protected nature reserves. The desert landscape wasn't particularly varied- it seemed that plant life was abundant but it was all the same plant, or pretty much. Low lying and greyish bushes dotted the sandy expanses in regular intervals on the main. The desert in my mind was sand dunes but the desert in reality, in this area, was rocky and with poor soil but not incapable of supporting life.

We drove on through the desert (in a car with no name*) through to Oatman, with me making myself slightly travel sick by playing with skit's camera far too much from the passenger seat. Oatman was a heaving mining town in the first half of the twentieth century with a transient population around 10 000 people. They apparently mined 1.8 million ounces of gold. But now, it's a ghost town with a population around 100 just clinging on for the small amount of tourism that comes in. And plenty of burros. These are donkey descendants of the original pack-animals here during the gold mining days. Though wild, it's clear that they are well looked after both by tourists and by the small population living there. Most of the shops (all tourist traps) sold burro food and the burros approached everyone in the usually correct expectation that food was in the offing.

Oatman was a town with a sense of humour with names like "The Glory Hole", "Prospector Bob's Mine" and "Fast Fanny's Place". We mosied up the street (it's a one street town and that street is Route 66), harangued by burros wanting to be fed, on a raised wooden "sidewalk". It wasn't exactly a movie set for a western but it was close with ramshackle wooden buildings and beat-up painted signs.

Though signs proclaimed that there were (staged) gunfights at 1pm, we didn't see any so we guessed that they were inside the buildings (there was a theatre and a bar) rather than out on the street though everything I read online prior to coming here suggested it was on the street. In retrospect I wonder if we were confused by the time difference between California and Arizona. Nevermind, we were entertained enough by the burros and atmosphere of the place.

We drove on to Kingman via Sitgreaves Pass through the Black Mountains which was a fun bit of abrupt elevation and tight corners in an otherwise straight and easy road. Historically, this pass was the death of many Model Ts that attempted the journey across the US. At Kingman, we stopped for lunch in a fairly kitsch 50s style diner decked out in a kind of minty green and bright pink. Their speciality appeared to be a tower of onion rings a couple of feet tall; the three people at the table next to us devoured a tower in a few minutes.

Route 66 between Kingman and Seligman, after which we had to go back onto the interstate, was dreadfully dull but made slightly more entertaining by "Burma Shave" signs. I knew of this advertising campaign from Quantum Leap (the pilot episode). They are a series of five signs with the first four being a four-line poem and the final sign presenting the product name. The signs in this area seemed to be somewhat more sparse than what was intended and we were often presented with only two or so of the four lines of the poem leaving us to guess what else was there.

For example, we saw one sign that read "Roses are pink" and then after a couple of moments another sign read "Who drive and drink". Googling tells me that the full rhyme is:
Violets are blue
Roses are pink
On graves of those
Who drive and drink
Burma-Shave

Most of the rhymes seemed to contain a road safety message from the snippets we caught.

We were also entertained by watching the mile signs increment and then suddenly change in value as soon as we got back onto the interstate. We thought they were just counting our miles along the historic route 66 but actually there were on every road in this trip in Arizona, Utah, Nevada and, later, Washington too (in Washington the mile sign had a silhouette of the eponymous figure on them). Quite an oddity and somewhat fun.

Our destination for the day was Tusayan (still in Arizona) which is the nearest town to Grand Canyon Village on the south rim. We stopped off at a Safeway in Williams to get supplies and headed north on a more minor road as the day turned to night. The sunset was pretty remarkable out of the car window and pretty long this mid-November day.

We found the hotel, hiding behind the IMAX in Tusayan. By this point, the temperature was sub-zero. The day on route 66 had been spent in "t-shirt weather" (even t-shirt weather by my reckoning) but the South Rim is at some significant elevation. The hotel had an inner atrium which meant that we could get from our room to the restaurant without much of an excursion outdoors. Skit and I enjoyed a nice dinner with nice wine and braced ourselves to go to our first proper destination the next day: the Grand Canyon.



* Mykey was clearly a demon possessing it but the car itself was nameless except for the descriptor "ace" which was derived from the number plate.