California - Day 1 - driving to Needles

Needles KOA, Needles

Tuesday, 1 March 2022

Dexter, and then I too, heard a pack of coyotes barking on our early morning walk.  I know coyotes are a real problem for lots of people - farmers and pet owners and so forth - but I'm still glad to know that the world of people hasn't completely stamped out the world of wild critters.

sort of today's route

This map (above) shows my route from Seligman in the east (via I-40) through Kingman and on into Nevada and down into California.  Unfortunately, I got fooled by the map showing state highway 95 as being the road that runs inside the Arizona state line.  I didn't realize AZ and CA both have a highway 95, and the one I used was California's, just to the west of AZ's.  See below:

also today's route

You can see I once again mistakenly marked the AZ version - and it's hard to erase a mark made with a highlighter.  The map above, by the way, is technically the AAA map and I got it from the Austin AAA office, but it was created by the Automobile Club of Southern California, according to its copyright information.  It looks different from the usual AAA maps, and marks the roads differently, and I don't find it as easy to use.  Oh, well.  I'm only here for a month.

On the road

Just after I left Seligman, I started seeing signs telling me Los Angeles was about 5 or 6 hours away.  Seemed odd to me to be directed to far western CA since I wasn't far from the middle of AZ, but I guess the highway people think everyone on I-40 wants to go to Los Angeles.

About halfway to Kingman the road suddenly started losing altitude, and I went from 5,000' to 4,000' within 10 minutes.

In Kingman I stopped at the CVS to pick up prescription refills, bought groceries and gasoline ($3.29/gallon) and had lunch, and started trying to get out of town at noon (traffic jam because of lunch-hour traffic and a large construction zone).

I took AZ-68 west from Kingman, traveling through Coyote Pass, elev. 3,737', and Union Pass, elev. 3,571'.  That was followed by a 6% grade for 12 miles, taking me to Bullhead City, elev. 504', so you can see there was some serious downhill driving going on here.

From there I crossed into Nevada, turned south, and came to California.

California - my 36th state

I guess the road I was on was too backwater to deserve a welcome-to-California sign, but I did get a Welcome to San Bernardino County sign.  Plus a sign telling me that "All Fireworks Including Safe and Sane Are Illegal in San Bernardino County."  What do you suppose "sane" fireworks are?  Sparklers?  And which ones are "insane?" 

The road generally followed the Colorado River and was closer than it looks on the map, because I could see it from time to time.  On the other side of the road was what I assumed to be Mojave Desert.  Tomorrow I plan to visit the Mojave National Preserve, but I'm including here the link to the Wikipedia page about the Mojave Desert.  https://en.wikipedia.org/Mojave-Desert  Because I've never much liked desert areas, I was still pretty ignorant about them, even after all the time I spent in New Mexico and Arizona, so I was glad to have an easy-to-understand explanation of what I was seeing.

On the radio I heard someone mention that Pres. Biden would be speaking soon, presumably about Covid, and the man said that since "the pandemic has been over for a year, that's a stupid thing to talk about."  I decided that if he thought the pandemic was even over now, let alone a year ago, he wasn't a reliable source of information and turned him off.

And on to the campground near Needles.