The only hiccup we encountered was a big wreck on I-15 in the Moapa Indian Reservation area. After sitting in traffic for about a half hour, we hopped off and took some side road off to the north and got back on the freeway past the accident. We arrived in Las Vegas in the early afternoon and stopped at the Heart Attack Grill for lunch.
I think this place started in Phoenix but moved to Las Vegas, possibly because people in Phoenix are a tiny bit health conscious.
All the guests wear a hospital gown over their clothes. We got a single burger and shared an order of fries. Each beef patty is 1/2 pound and you can get from one to eight patties per burger. If you don't finish your food, the server whacks you HARD on the rear with a wooden paddle three times. We finished.
Our server was Nurse Rickey. All the servers are "nurses."
We still weren't very hungry when we finally pulled into Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a few hours later, so we settled for ice cream for dinner. My dinner was a banana split with chocolate, strawberry and maple nut ice cream, with hot fudge, pineapple and butterscotch topping. And, of course, whipped cream, nuts and a cherry.
Saturday morning we wandered down to the London Bridge. If you don't know the history, you should look it up. Basically, the bridge used to be over the Thames River in London. Built in the 1830s, by the 1960s it wasn't sound for London Traffic, so the city sold it to Robert McCulloch of change saw (and oil) fame. The US Federal government gave him land on the Colorado River, where he built Lake Havasu City and installed the bridge to an island in the Lake Havasu reservoir as a tourist attraction. The city has since boomed. The day were were there, they city was hosting a personal watercraft 500-mile endurance race. Last year's winner averaged about 70 MPH.
The bridge from the Heat Hotel beach.
Just of few of the hundreds of bird nests attached to the underside of the bridge.
Well, that's about all there is to see in Lake Havasu City, so we headed south past Parker to Bouse on Highway 73, where we went cactus hunting on a dirt road to the north. Don't tell Chieko we took her car 4-wheeling. I was hoping some cactus flowers would be blooming, but we didn't see any blooming cacti. We did see a lot of suguaro cactus and other interesting desert plants.
One of the cacti.
We didn't see any animals here, either, but we did see a lot of lizard, bird and snake tracks.
The suguaro also housed quite a few bird nests and appeared to have been pecked for food by birds.
These cacti are tall. Some grow to 30 feet.
There were also interesting green, very green, trees. All very hardy.
This place is also popular for ATVs and desert races. This is not the road we drove on. We were on a well-graded road. These ad hoc roads looked like they went pretty much wherever someone on an ATV decided to go.
From Cactus Flats, we headed to the Mojave National Preserve in California. Our first stop was this one-room school house museum in Goffs.
The inside of the school has been restored to its somewhat original state. Outside are a lot of old vehicles, farm implements and other stuff that we really didn't look at too much.
From Goffs, we headed north into the Mojave National Preserve along a paved road that quickly turned into a dirt road with numerous washes that you would not want to drive through during any rain storm.
Here we found all kinds of cactus and desert plants that I can't identify but enjoyed looking at and photographing.
These plants are amazingly tough.
Almost all have painful armor, both small spines and long leaves with hard, sharp daggerlike ends.
This cactus was especially tricky as it usually grew in the middle of a little harmless-looking sage brush-type plant.
It is not kind to people who aren't paying full attention.
These needles are very sharp and have mean little barbs that cling tightly to socks and skin.
This plant has not only stabbing leaves, but also a flower ready to bloom.
Here's a flower clump in bloom.
These flowers are thick and waxy to hold in moisture.
The plants come in a variety of colors.
Some cacti and plants are very big, very small and everywhere in between.
This one has a heavy conniferlike bark at the bottom that turns into a palm-treelike cover higher up.
These berries or something nearby was very sweet and pleasant-smelling, like a nice air freshener. I considered squishing these up and patting the juice on my face like after shave, but then I pictured it eating the skin off my face.
As the sun started to set, the mountains turned dark and the jets left long contrails.
The desert plants and far mountains were beautiful in their desert sort of way.
The Joshua Trees were thick through here.
As the sun set, we left the Preserve and headed to Primm then Las Vegas.
We stopped at Rolling Smoke Barbecue for dinner. This place gets very high marks in all the reviews for very good reason, and it was crowded. I've been here a few times, so I knew it was good. It is not in a nice part of town. And we waited in a long line to order.
Thes is one of the few BBQ places that serves beef ribs (along with every other kind) so I had to try those. The food was well worth the drive through the underside of Las Vegas and the wait.
On Sunday morning we ate toaster waffles from a drawer at the Super 8 near Nellis Air Force Base. Then we headed home, stopping at Kolob Canyons, where we've never stopped before. This is part of Zion's National Park, but it's on the west side the mountain and accessible directly from I-15.
It's an interesting place.
All in all, we put almost 1,400 miles on Chieko's car in three days and saw some places we've never seen before.
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