Las Vegas -We made it!

20 December 2006

We have made it to our big destination of Las Vegas to spend the holidays with Katie, who lives here, and Heather and Ryan who took the easy way and flew from Florida for the holidays. It has been a mostly fun journey with challenges thrown in to make it really worthwhile and appreciate the adventure of the trip. We also traveled thru 17 states.

As we were planning the final portion of our trip from Tucson to Las Vegas, we realized that we were going to go right by Quartzsite, AZ which has developed into a huge RV destination that is much talked about in RV circles. It was a topic at the RV seminar we attended back in May, and the bottom line of that discussion was you either hated it or loved it. So we decided that we would at least stop there overnight and see what was going on. The short version of the attraction is that this small AZ town of three thousand or so inhabitants swells to 1.2 million during the months of January and February for a huge rock show, RV show, car show etc. All sponsored by the community. Most of the people attend these events by RV. They are able to do this due to the large amount of Bureau of Land Management land that is available for RV’s to park nearly free in the “dry “camping mode. (No services)

So we stopped at a quaint RV park on the main street that was still fairly quiet before the influx of vendors and RV visitors for the upcoming shows. We walked the permanent flea market type establishments and some of the local stores. It was hard to imagine what it was going to be like in the coming weeks with a million more people and hundreds of thousands of RV’s covering the desert floor all around the town. We are not sure we want to know. We did notice in walking around that there seems to be a lot of males in this town that resemble Willie Nelson. I am not sure what that means.

We saw a note in the Quartzsite Improvement Associations flyer of a show being held at the main QIA building at 7PM by Rick Morgenstern, a singer and impersonator/comedian. Entrance was a $5 donation and the turnout was, to put it politely, rather small. It was never the less a very good two hour show. A good introduction to Las Vegas, and I am sure at a lot better price.

After leaving Quartzsite, we headed west and North and traveled part of the historic route 66 highway and crossed a good portion of the Mojave Desert on a two lane road, much like those of my childhood travels.

A word about the frog. If you have noticed the frog in any of our photos of the road, it is the symbol of the Northwest Ohio Winnebago owner’s chapter that we belong too. After our run in with the drunk driver in Louisiana, we put him in the corner of the coach where he could watch for traffic in the mirror. Since then no one has been able to sneak up on us from the right. It also means that he appears in many of the pictures along the road.

We wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. We have been pleasantly surprised by the number of readers of this blog who we did not know before we started this effort, who have been kind enough to take an interest in this adventure. We are also pleased by the number of people that we originally intended this for that are actually reading it, as well

These entries make become less frequent as we stay over in this busy city, but will resume when we “hit the road” again after the New Year.