Photos from Lake Havasu City - finally.

Success! I cleared the cache, emptied the cookie jar, dumped the history files and "smallenized" the pictures. Dunno which one worked, but at least I can add photos again. (Albeit ever so slowly!)

This is why we came south. Sunshine, blue skies and palm trees.

I snapped this just as we were leaving the Shady Acres Retirement Home on Boxing Day. This one wins the prize for the biggest honkin' RV I've ever seen!

This is the first campsite that we stayed one night at just outside of Lake Havasu City. It's a very flattering picture actually. If I'd turned the camera in the other direction you'd see it was just a parking lot.

The only good thing about this place was easy access to the lake. (Sorry, we took the back route to the beach, so we didn't see the signs about no dogs allowed on the beach until we were leaving)
Vincent is much happier in this location: Windsor Beach

There have been some pretty spectacular sunsets.

London Bridge with palm trees. Nice!

The fancy dog park.

A cool tree in the neighborhood. No, that's not frost.

We heard some rattling outside one night and looked out the window to see this family of racoons helping themselves to Taz's kibble. They also absconded with her treat ball, an eighth of a package of the kibble & bits that goes into the treat ball, a package of watermelon scented hand wipes and an orange juice - all of which were in the tent!

Lake Havasu City, Arizona

Okay, I give up on the photos for this entry. I keep losing the internet connection. We are currently at a State Park campground called Windsor Beach, near Lake Havasu City, Arizona. We stayed one night at a different campground a couple of miles down the road, but hated it. We checked out 2 other places (both awful), before finding this. Beats me what the attraction is to campgrounds with no vegetation and the sites laid out on a grid. You might as well pull into the Walmart parking lot! This is much more our style. No powered sites, which equals no big motor homes - and we're right on the lake, which makes Taz happy. The original plan was to stay a couple of nights then move on, but we're enjoying the place, so we signed up for the bargain plan. Pay for 5 nights and get 2 free. It never occurred to us to turn on the computer, but the campground "host" mentioned that he can sometimes connect to the Super 8's internet, so we thought we'd give it a try. It's a spotty connection at best, but it's free! (The Super 8 is probably 500 yards away though, so we're lucky to get it at all!)
I knew that the London Bridge had been moved to somewhere in Arizona, but I didn't know where. And I'd never heard of Lake Havasu City before, so it was kind of a surprise to me to stumble into the place where the bridge now lives.
It was purchased in 1967 for 2.5 million dollars, shipped across the Atlantic and reassembled here piece by piece! I guess that's better than just sinking it into the Thames.
The bridge is a nice 20 minute walk along a sandy beach from here, so we've wandered over every day. We stop along the way and throw endless sticks into the river for Taz. We found an off-leash dog park just a ways past the bridge - probably the fanciest dog-park ever. Palm trees, lush green grass (in the middle of a desert!), lots of benches and picnic tables and a thousand tennis balls scattered around the place!

I'll add pictures next time we get to a reliable internet source - it was just TOO frustrating trying to upload them here.

Christmas in Vincent

All of the ingredients for a good Christmas morning: champagne & orange juice, the Christmas "tree" candle (thanks, Connie) and presents (thanks, Wongs). We also had images of Christmas' past on the screen saver. Taz had a ball with the wrapping paper!

Why, yes - that IS bacon on my forehead, thanks for noticing....

Bacon bandaids, Lesley?? Where the Hell do you shop?

The aftermath:

A ½ hour later and she still has bacon on her head and wrapping paper stuck to her mouth!

Okay, that was fun! But now it's raining, so it's time to settle in with a book and what's left of the champagne. I hope everyone is having a Merry Christmas.

Later: Photographic proof that we obeyed the Cowling rule:

NO SILLY HAT, NO CHRISTMAS DINNER!

Even though dinner was rice and stir-fried vegetables.

The champagne bottle is empty and the Baileys will be in about 10 minutes.

It's not Christmas without a turkey - here's ours!

Another change of plan

Okay, I'm not gonna bother telling you what our plans are anymore - we don't follow them anyway. After checking the weather reports, which called for crap starting this afternoon and lasting for the next 3 days, we decided to stay put in Bullhead City. We've moved out of the nasty (and rather expensive) motel that we stayed in last night and into an RV Resort. Yes, really! An honest-to-goodness RV resort!

With actual streets of monster-sized motor homes.

Does Vincent look just a little out of place amongst these massive units?! And a tent? These people have only ever seen pictures of tents...

So, why are we here? Well the free internet was the main draw. We figured if we were gonna be stuck inside for 3 days, we might as well have full power for reading and access to Bubble Words. (It's a Facebook game that I'm hopelessly addicted to.)

Of course the weather has been great all day and there is no sign of the impending storm that they were threatening. We sat outside without jackets and had beers and nachos this afternoon. Oh well, we are resigned to life at Shady Acres Retirement Home for the next 3 days.

Valley of Fire

We almost didn't go. We almost chucked out the plan because we didn't think we were warm enough yet. We were going to go further south instead. Then just before we checked out of our hotel in Mesquite, we read Melody's comment on the blog and figured that if she wanted to go back, it must be worth going to. So, thank you Melody. I am SO glad we went! We just spent 3 amazing days touring the Valley of Fire in Nevada. The colours and the bizarre rock formations just blew us away. Neither of us had ever heard of this state park before, but we're not likely to forget it now. We stayed at the Atlatl Rock campground (my new all-time favourite campground!) and because we didn't require a powered site, we had our pick of the coolest campsites ever.

Here are a few pictures around the park just to give you an idea:

And this is our campsite:

This rock was behind the tent The colours changed with the light. At sunrise the view from our window was this rock precariously perched right above us in unbelievable shades of gold and orange:
And of course you've already seen the new blog picture. Much more indicative of travels with Vincent II.

Oh yeah, Dan had a birthday while we were there. We celebrated with an apple fritter. It was as close as I could come to birthday cake.

We're in Bullhead Arizona now, just across the river from Laughlin. I think we're heading for Death Valley tomorrow, so we'll be internet-less for a few days or maybe a week. Bye for now and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

P.S. Sorry we missed you in Yuma, Cornell.

Change of plan

First of all, in retrospect, the beers with dinner and the wine afterwards were maybe not such a good idea. I'm not feeling really bright and shiny today.
Secondly, our hotel name is Virgin River Casino, not Silver-something. See above for explanation/excuse.
After consulting with Rand McNally, it looks like Death Valley is do-able, but another long drive away. We've decided go to Valley of Fire state park instead, which is practically walking distance from here. I don't expect they'll have Wi-Fi, so if we're out of touch for a few days, you know why.

Snow, rain, sunshine and finally - palm trees!

We got a really late start today, mainly because we didn't really think we were going anywhere. We dilly-dallied around the hotel and then went out for a nice leisurely breakfast and before we actually decided to give the highways a try, it was after noon.

Here are some pictures around Provo this morning:

The highway was pretty crappy, but only for about an hour. The storm wasn't as bad as predicted. They were originally talking about a foot of snow, but it petered out to a few inches. We were on bare, dry pavement most of the day.

This is just a house along the way that I liked the look of.

I know the picture is blurry, but the important thing is that there is still snow on the ground only a hundred miles from Las Vegas. I know, there is snow actually IN Vegas, but this still seems wrong somehow.

Another blurry picture, but this time the important factor is the lack of snow! It disappeared as soon as we dropped down from the high plains.

And look! Palm trees! This is in Mesquite where we are staying tonight. Not exactly balmy yet, but not freakin' cold like it has been so far.

This is our hotel. The Silver something or other. It's a huge Casino complex, but it's clean, cheap and of course, dog-friendly.

This is the bottom of our bathroom door. It would appear that some people leave their dogs locked in the bathroom while they gamble in the casino.

Dan is working on the world's s-l-o-w-e-s-t internet connection. They charge $9.00/24 hrs. You can't buy less than 24 hours because they know that's how long it takes to check your e-mails... And downloading photos for a blog entry? Lots of time to finish a bottle of wine!
We've been living on fast food for a few days now, so to have a real meal in a real restaurant was a treat. Pretty good Chinese food too.
We asked the waiter to box the leftover rice for Taz and he not only put in our rice, but added some more AND some ribs from the kitchen! Lucky dog!


Not sure what our plans are for tomorrow. We're thinking Death Valley, but we haven't actually looked at a map to know if that's do-able or not. We're looking forward to being able to camp. We want to park ourselves in one spot for a least a week and veg!