Episode 2 - Getting Settled

We arrived in Bullhead City, Arizona and booked into the Bullhead RV Park upon the recommendation of a couple we met in Las Vegas. It seemed like a nice park with all of the amenities like a pool, hot-tub, clubroom, cable at all sites and offered quite a few activities.

The sites have trees and shrubs around them. They are staggered and that gives each site a degree of privacy. There are about 150 sites and about 75% are snowbirds, mostly from the northern states. As a matter of fact there is only one other Canadian RV couple here and they are from Gull Lake, Alberta. We've seen very few Canadian licence plates - probably the dollar is the main reason as well as a fear of travel.

Bullhead City, Arizona is across the Colorado River from Laughlin, Nevada and about 30 miles from Needles, California, so it's central and a good base to travel from. To get out of the Colorado River Valley (where Bullhead City and Laughlin are), we climbed from 550 ft. to about 3000 ft. in about 10 miles of steep (6-7% grade) roadway.

Talking about steep roadways, since 9/11 they are not allowing truck or RV traffic over all power dams - that includes the Hoover Dam and our local Davis Dam - that means heavy truck traffic re-route through Bullhead City. That means real heavy traffic on those steep hills. In the last three weeks there have been five runaways that ended in trucks piling in to cars at the bottom of the hill which has cross roads and intersections. Last Friday night one piled into eleven cars before flipping over on the bridge that connects Laughlin and Bullhead City. Luckily no one was seriously injured. We were over at Laughlin at the time which meant we had to drive up the Colorado River. We were able cross the Davis Dam to come home - about 20 miles around.

We go over to Laughlin quite often to take advantage of the cheap meals in the Casinos (.99 for a full breakfast, $1.96 for supper or $3.95 for a buffet). There is no way you can cook and eat for that at home. Besides, Lynne likes playing Black Jack and is pretty good at it. One of the casinos, The Avi (on a Reservation in Nevada about 10 minutes away) has a free Black Jack tournament every Friday and she made it into the semi-finals.

Here are some shots of the area and some of the Casinos complete with Christmas decorations.

The Casinos are really hurting since the terrorist attack, but we hear that Vegas is worse. There have been a lot of layoffs there so all the Casinos are trying to attract customers with all kinds of promotions.