Skip to main content

Kingman, AZ to Barstow, CA

Image
By

We loaded our car for our longest stage yet on this our penultimate day on Route 66. As most of our journey would be across the inhospitable Mojave Desert we made sure we were well prepared - tyres pumped and tank full. We headed back to Mr D'z Route 66 Diner to fuel ourselves for the journey. We felt this diner really captures the spirit of the Route with its 1950s decor and juke box music.


Our first stop was to be Oatman. We knew that the drive there would be different. The Old Route twists and turns up to Sitgreaves Pass (elevation 3350feet) and down again before reaching Oatman. There were steep switchbacks and many of the hairpin turns had speed limits as low as 10mph.



Nevertheless there were many opportunities to pull over to take photos, some of which you can see below.


We reached Oatman which looked like a Wild West stage set complete with gunslingers having shootouts every so often. Instead of horses, there were wild burros wandering up and down the Main Street (the only street). They were cute enough to know which visitors to their town had bought alfalfa cubes (in the local store) to feed them.

Take your turn please!

No ice in the water please!

Before long we crossed the State line into California, the eighth state of the Route but our ninth state (because of our Las Vegas detour). We were now driving through the Mojave Desert, not as featureless as we had imagined - a harsh desert landscape of volcanic cinder cones with cactus and shrub-like flora.






We stopped for lunch in Needles, one of the hottest places in the country. We experienced this ourselves as the temperature hit the 100F mark while we were there.

We had to drive on the Interstate a number of times because the original route petered out every so often. The road surface varied from very good to very poor.


And at times the road appeared to stretch as far as the eye could see.


Despite the length of today's journey, necessary slow speeds and several stops, we reached Barstow about 5pm.



Comments

  1. Bernadette12 October 2015 at 01:33

    Oh dear ,the end is nigh !!!!!But what an adventure you've had----a great memory!!!

    Bernadette

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown20 October 2015 at 12:23

    Sitting in a rather cold Louvain, I can almost feel the heat from yout photos and those sparingly blue skies! R

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holbrook, AZ to Peach Springs, AZ

By
We left Holbrook in bright sunshine and continued our drive along Rte 66 which once again had us driving on the Interstate at times. Our first stop was in Winslow made famous when The Eagles recorded "Take It Easy" whose second verse starts with "Standin' on a corner in Winslow Arizona". We then drove on to Flagstaff but didn't stop in the city. Flagstaff has a beautiful forested location high up on the Colorado Plateau and it was a change to be driving on roads lined with tall ponderosa pine trees. We had a picnic lunch off the beaten track in Buckskinner Park, Williams, AZ. We followed a dirt trail to the picnic area which really tested our car's tyres.  They survived, thankfully. We soon found ourselves in Seligman (pronounced Sligman), a sleepy town which maintains a lot of its historic character together with a few unexpected twists - eg Santa in a Chevvy outside the wacky Snow Cap Drive-in. Our destination for the night was th...
2 comments
Read more

Seattle, WA

By
  We left Everett on Sunday morning and headed south to Seattle, our final stop on this trip. We drove to our hotel and dropped off our cases before we headed to SeaTac to return our car.  After the brief stop at the hotel we drove to Kubota Garden, a 20-acre Japanese garden in one of Seattle’s southern neighbourhoods. It was started in 1927 by Fijitaro Kubota, a Japanese immigrant. It is an urban oasis  with Japanese and native trees and plants, ponds and waterfalls. It was beautiful with its fall colours.  The following morning we headed down to the waterfront to the historic Pike Place Market where Starbucks first opened its doors to the public in 1971.  Then we wandered through the market which opened in 1907 and strolled by the numerous stalls of seafood, fresh produce, crafts and flowers.  On Tuesday we took the monorail, which was the first commercial monorail in the USA and built in 1962 as an attraction for the 1962 World’s Fair. It still uses the ...
3 comments
Read more

Amarillo, Texas to Tucumcari, New Mexico

By
We packed up after breakfast and continued our drive through Texas. Our first stop was at a ranch. Usually one expects to see horses at a ranch but this one was home to a row of half-buried Cadillacs! It was the idea of a controversial millionaire, Stanley Marsh from Amarillo. He said he created it as tribute to the golden age of car travel!! Visitors are encouraged to leave their mark by spray painting their names, comments etc. on the cars. We soon reached Vega, another small town with lots of Rte 66 treasures including a restored 1920s Magnolia gas station and the Milburn-Price Museum in what was previously the town bus station. Miss Karen, the owner told us lots of interesting stories about the museum pieces which were all donated by local families. Outside the museum there was a beautifully restored 1923 Model T Ford. We reached Adrian, TX which marks the mid point of the Route - 1139 miles east to Chicago and 1139 miles to Santa Monica, Los Angel...
Post a Comment
Read more