Day 10 - Lake Havasu City to Flagstaff

From evidence of Fascism under London Bridge to a tarnished icon of Route 66 to a very large retail experience and very shiny dining experience 

After leaving the hotel, we wanted to take a closer look at London Bridge and parked up close by. The bridge still spans a river and various boats offered tourist excursions including a paddle steamer rejoicing under the name of 'Dixie Bell'. A wide embankment ran along the river and adjacent were a plentiful array of diners, restaurants and tourist gift shops. I walked into one out of curiosity and my eye was caught by the stock of baseball caps, many with patriotic symbols and words but a significant number with slogans in support of Donald Trump and the gun lobby. I was the only customer and the lady shopkeeper asked if I was interested in the Trump merchandise? I laughed and replied that I didn't think it would make me very popular when I returned home. She instantly recognised my accent as, it turned out, she was married to an Englishman. We began to talk about the legacy and what might lie ahead for President Trump. I realised that she had dropped her voice and she confessed that she was scared to express her anti-Trump views because it might result in her shop being vandalised. Astonishingly she characterised the fear she clearly felt as being in a country "like Germany under Hitler" with the wearing of Trump and anti-gun control messages analogous to a fascist insignia such as a black shirt. I wished her well for the future and left somewhat shocked by what she had described. 

We drove on to Oatman which was supposedly an iconic town on the Route 66 historical road journey, complete with donkeys allowed to roam free. I had a vision of the New Forest only hotter. The town was named after Olive Oatman who was one of only three survivors from her family of nine following an attack by a native American tribe after a trading exchange between them went sour. Olive and her sister became captives while her oldest brother was left for dead but somehow survived.

After a year or so the two girls were traded to the Mohave tribe and their lives improved to the point where evidence suggests they were assimilated by being tattooed on their arms and chins which is only something done under tribal custom to Mohave people. Four years later, Olive agreed to leave the Mohave, partly to secure safety for them and avoid a 'rescue' mission, after rumours began circulating of a white woman living among the tribe. She became headline news across the West and her blue tattooed chin a curiosity. A book followed and a tour where she gave lectures on her experiences. And this is where an impression of a conflicted person arose, as the public wanted to hear stories of a woman held in captivity and subjected to unspeakable mistreatment, where it was more probable that the reality of her life with the Mohave was very different. Unfortunately, it was in her financial interests to talk up the unsavoury and her celebrity naturally grew from doing so.  

As we approached Oatman, the signs guided us into a parking area which was deeply rutted and pot-holed and in a far worse condition than anything we had encountered in the most remote areas of our journey so far. Walking into the main street the buildings had old wooden frontages and verandas with handrails to separate them from the thoroughfare below. It was clear this was intended to recreate a 'wild west' town, an impression confirmed when a man, dressed as a cowboy standing near me, announced on the PA system that the next gunfight would be at 1pm; just like it used to be back in the day I assumed.

We wandered up main street now occupied by tourist gift shops, jewellers and diners (and the aforementioned donkeys, one of which was stood halfway into a shop entrance), rather than saloons and livery stores. Tacky and a bit run down would be fair to add on a Tripadvisor review. A 'history' of Olive Oatman was displayed outside one store. It could have been a transcript from one of her lectures; hostile in tone to the native-Americans with no reference to her assimilation by the Mohave. A display of anti-gun control baseball caps nearby confirmed that there was no grasp of reality in a town pretending to be in the 1870s so we left.

We headed north east for lunch and stumbled across another Black Bear diner in Kingman. We knew our limits this time and that there was still more tourism ahead of us today. We chose carefully and returned to our car satisfied rather than bursting. We continued along Route 66 which offered beautiful, increasingly elevated views of the dry valley floor below and quickly cleared our heads of the impressions that Oatman had given. Apparently, in the 1920s and 30s car drivers were often too nervous to drive their vehicles through this stretch and paid people to navigate their cars around the hair pin bends that we were now encountering. In a Model T Ford, I think I might have chosen that option too. 

Route 66 merged on to Interstate 40 and we ended our day in Flagstaff and Adam's new hometown. We were now moving into the business end of our trip and practical things had to be done. Adam's university accommodation was empty of any kitchen items such as cutlery, crockery and pans or bedding we'd been told. Our suitcases weren't large enough to include that as well so we had to find a suitable place to go shopping. We had noticed some Walmart stores on our journey and there was one about ten minutes away.

'Store' is not an appropriate description as these are retail outlets that even the 'hyper' in hypermarket could not do justice. They are out of town behemoths of a consistent design: Three large archway-style entrances with one for garden and outdoor items, one for homeware and the last for what we would consider the food supermarket. Our car was parked near the outdoor section so we went in through that arch and found ourselves in a car parts section that would rival a Halfords; racks of car tyres, parts and all manner of accessories followed by rows of bicycles, sporting equipment and, remembering this is America, a display of guns and ammunition. In part, it felt like the retail equivalent of the vast landscapes that we had been passing through and again, the "wow" word seemed the only initial utterance we could muster. At one point we found an aisle, yes a complete aisle, of dried flowers.

We returned to our hotel with everything (that seems an obvious statement to make) we could sensibly purchase without knowing what exactly we would find in Adam's accommodation. We had spotted a 1950's-style diner called Galaxys just across the road from our hotel and, for a change, were able to walk to our evening meal. Stepping in, this was something like the set of the diner in that iconic dance scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. A curved seating space was positioned in front of the kitchen area with red leather topped stools at regular intervals perched on chrome poles. In front of these, was an expanse of chrome countertop on which the diners were served. In fact, wherever possible any fitting was in chrome to create a gleaming sea of silver and, as I had now slipped into practical mode from accept anything road trip mode, I thought a huge headache for the cleaners dealing with the fingerprint marks left on all these surfaces.

We were shown to a booth and just across the floor from us, we discovered that we were to be entertained by live music; maybe my analogy with Pulp Fiction wasn't so far amiss? An elderly gentleman, who resembled a caricature from an old frontier mining town, was going to serenade us by singing, playing guitar, mandolin and keyboards. For a Saturday night, the diner was pretty empty and the idle staff joined in at times with any chorus they knew and supplemented the applause from the paltry number of diners that were paying any attention. Our meal finished and paid for, I wandered over and put $2 in the glass jar in front of him which, judging by the look of surprise, made his day I think.