Las Vegas to Palm Springs

The final leg of our long, two-week trip from Atlanta to Palm Springs ends today.  But first we have to get out of Las Vegas (reminding me of that Nicholas Cage movie!).  Bumper to bumper traffic in this city that we never want to visit again!  By night, it looks like the futuristic city in "Blade Runner" and by day it is so hot that our usually efficient air conditioning seemed not even to be working.

Finally we are on our way, after being tangled in traffic for an hour, over the mountain to Arizona to see another great feat of engineering, Hoover Dam.  The Colorado River and Lake Mead stretch out before and below us.

As we descend toward California, we stop for a picnic on the shores of Lake Mead. This is the only place for miles around to escape the heat, and there is much swimming and boating out on this blue lake.

We turn and see something ambling down the road which I initially took to be deer, but a park ranger informed me they were Desert Bighorn Sheep, a smaller variety, a stag and his ewes coming down to the lake shore to drink a little water.

We are on the famous Route 66 now, "The Mother Road," on our way to the Surprise and Delight, which is the little western town of Oatman, Arizona.  (We have already heard about this place from Martha's Dad and also from our friend Bob.)  This colorful owners of this gift shop along the way seemed to be unaware that the road would soon by crowded with Mini Coopers!  It was so hot, the woman said, that "you have to light a fire to stay cool!"

We arrive in Oatman mid-day, and it is exactly as has been described to us.  Wild burros, descendants of those which originally lived here when it was a mining Town, wander freely in the streets, protected now by Federal law.  They are quite tame!

One little fellow is curled up in the shade on the wooden sidewalk, like a cat or a dog, taking a little nap in the heat of the day.

This is desolate country, and it is hard to believe that anything except gold and silver (and uranium) would compel sane men and women to seek it out and settle here. 

 I've been through the desert on a horse with no name

We cross the Colorado River into California finally, flat desert with jagged mountains scattered about like glaciers on the ocean. 

At the end of a long day, we arrive in Palm Springs at our final evening event in the Palm Springs Air Museum, and it is a good one - a great rock-and-roll band and delicious, healthy food everywhere. 

But it is getting late and we need to find The Ace Hotel out here in the darkness, which turns out to be surely the strangest place we have ever stayed.  We had some difficulty even finding our room in the dark, and finally we entered a room that seemed like something out of a college dorm in the 60s - canvas on the walls, tree stumps for bedside tables, and the mattress literally a few inches from the floor.  I thought it might be a waterbed at first.  What was worse was no coffee maker in this or any of the other rooms, and none in the motel until 7:30 in the morning, we were informed.  Don't they realize the world runs on coffee as much as it does on gasoline?