Nice Combo: Hot Desert & Colorado River

It feels wonderful to be back at almost sea level! I can breathe. About 14 miles east of Searchlight, NV (an hour south of Las Vegas) is this great National Park on the Mojave Lake. Cottonwood Cove is a campground right on Lake Mojave - a 67-mile stretch of the Colorado River.

After hours of driving through the mountains of the Mojave Desert and through a town of gold mining claims you think there is no way there is going to be anything worthwhile at the end. Then SURPRISE, the mountains seem to part, this amazingly blue water appears out of nowhere and the backdrop is the gorgeous purple mountains of Arizona. Unbelievable!

Our friends, Carol and Vic whom we met in Titusville are here as camp hosts. They lived in Vegas for 20 years (transplanted from Mass.). In fact, they took us for the best tour yesterday. Vic says he is nosy – which is why he tends to find out all there is to know about a place. And after over 15 years of visiting this area – he knows about things you can’t even imagine anyone could find out!

We started out with a miner's breakfast at The Nugget. Yes, it is also a casino - people were gambling while we enjoyed 10-cent coffee!! Huge breakfast for the four of us was well under $20. Then we took a ride through Christmas Pass (there are stretches where people decorate the desert bushes with "ornaments") to see the many faces of the desert. Silly me still thought the desert was just flat sand . . . HA!

After climbing mountains on the narrow, switchback part of Historic Rt. 66 (they actually crossed this way in a motorhome pulling a car not too many years ago - Vic is nuts!) stopping to check out abandoned mines and mining towns we ended up in Oatman.

This is a blast out of the past, for sure. Vic's brother used to own The Oatman Hotel whose claim to fame was that Clarke Gable and Carole Lombard supposedly were married in Oatman and spent their wedding night on the second floor of this hotel. The room is kept as a shrine with the door now part glass so you can see inside! Part ghost town, part tourist theatrics - it was a fun afternoon. The burros we met on the mountain roads come down into town to beg carrots from visitors. Conveniently, shops sell bags of them in big boxes outside their doors. Beers still cost $2.00 and "burro ears" are fabulous homemade dark fried potato chips! Yum!

The return trip included stopping in Searchlight at The Nugget again, this time to play cards! The afternoon draw is the $1.00 drinks and draft beers! If you are sitting at a game table or at a slot machine - the drinks are free!!! What? So, the boys sat at the bar shooting the breeze (!) with the locals while Carol and I played nickel poker - whoooo hooooo. Hey, I was up $20 a couple of times!!

The evening entertainment was watching all the families from Southern Calif. Arriving with their HUGE SUV’s and trucks towing trailers and boats and jet skis . . . The place filled up quickly. The crowds however, don’t compare to the steady line of people trying to get their boats through the public launch today. They have been dropping boats into the cove steadily the last 8 hours with no sign of the end of it. In fact, Vic is taking a shift driving a van several miles back to a primitive campground and parking lot where they have to park their trucks and empty boat trailers. He thinks he won’t be done until after 6pm.

The campground has already sold over 30,000lbs of bagged ice between yesterday and today! Nice racket. Why didn’t I think of that?

Happy Memorial Day! More later.
Happy Graduation Weekend, Kady! Thanks, Ali for filling in for us!
Jody