Saturday February 21 Kingman to Oatman on Route 66

What fun it was driving along Old Route 66 – it took forever as there were so many photo opportunities. We stopped at a reconstruction of a store called Historic Cool Springs Gift Shop and Museum. The owner entertained us with stories about her pet, a wild road runner; apparently they are meat eaters! Because this female road runner is fed so well, each year all three of her babies survive; this is contrary to the norm, where only one survives.

We arrived at Oatman where the main attraction is the wild mules who eat carrots from people’s hands. So of course this became our ‘ass’ photo day! When we first arrived we were confused as to why all the small white mules (babies) had stickers on their foreheads. On closer examination, the stickers showed a big ‘x’ over a carrot similar to the ‘don’t drink and drive’ symbol. It was explained to us by a shop owner that sells the bags of carrots that the young mules could choke on carrots. A crazy Irish one man band loaned us his green hat and glasses. Needless to say, we could tell the taverns were open. We helped control traffic for the mock old west bank robbery gunfight - Marilyn winced with every shot fired. Oatman is certainly very historically interesting but it does not seem to have the same community or state support as say Tombstone. The potential certainly does exist to develop tourism further in this "mule" of a town. Given that we couldn’t find a suitable place to have supper we returned to the RV to eat and leave as the sun was going down. Much to our surprise the mules started to leave town at sundown too. One adventurous fellow stuck his head in the driver’s window insisting on a rendition of ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner!” It was difficult to discourage this rather stubborn mule – who knew? – but we finally found our way back onto Route 66. We drove to our favourite state park in Lake Havasu while enjoying another fabulous sunset.