Kingman to Las Vegas

We wandered down to breakfast at the Comfort Inn to be met with a scene out of 'My Name Is Earl' where all the unemployed, homeless and hopeless had gathered to fill up on junk food to expand their already obese frames. We of course took down our doggy bag and ushered all we could carry into it for grazing later on in the day to offset the high food prices when eating out in the U.S.A.

Even the trucks were humping each other.

   After packing up we hit the road, pumped up our constantly deflating tyre and hit the Route 66 museum. Inside we were treated to the history of Route 66 which condenses down to they had a great road which transversed America from the Great Lakes to Los Angeles. It was used by all those looking for a better life in the west. It created incredible stories over the years of Indian encounters from the early years to young bucks in big bruiser cars cruising it looking for adventure in the big bad wild west in the later years. So with so many fond memories of the native clientele of such a iconic road what did the American government do? Paved over it and turned most of it into a generic boring interstate highway. And that was the end of route 66. And now they try to sell it as this amazing road trip for tourists but really the glory days are over and it is just another icon that has been put in room 101. The museum was good though with some interesting exhibits and a film being shown.

Caught red handed coming out of shop of ill repute.

   After we crossed the road to have some coffee (pronounced qwaffee) and some good old home made warm apple pie in an old school American diner. It was decorated with pastel colours as in the 60's and inside it had all the redeeming features of that era. Chrome bar stools....check, jukebox.....check, big fat juicy stacked burgers.....check, tacky route 66 memorabilia.....check, free coffee refills.....check!

Elvis was looking younger than we remembered him.

Then it was off to look at some American muscle cars at a car dealership, sizing up the prices to imagine if we could afford to buy one and hit route 66 in real style. In the real world the answer was no. Kingman was a really nice photogenic town and was a cool place to spend a day in but time was ticking and we had to be in Las Vegas by the evening so we left route 66 for the last time and headed back. On the way we stopped off at the Hoover Dam, a marvel of engineering of the 1930's and the O'callaghan/Tillman Bridge which is an engineering feat of 2009. Both were impressive structures and well worth the stop off. The Hoover Dam still supplies most of the electricity for a vast area of the western U.S.A. including all of Las Vegas. One thing we did notice though was how low the water level was in Lake Mead. It appears the continuing lack of rainfall is depleting the lake to record low levels.

If I be dammed, we could not find a single hoover anywhere.

    We then pushed on to the last 30 miles into Vegas and arrived at our apartment which we had booked at the last minute as our AirBnB booking had cancelled on us. Luckily the apartment was large and lush so we settled in and started to try to reduce our accumulation of belongings since arriving here as we had to give the car back the next day and catch a flight to our next destination Costa Rica.
   We finally condensed our belongings next morning down to something we could actually carry on our backs without crippling ourselves. We strung it out at the condo as long as we could until midday and then headed back to the airport to return the car. First we had to pump the tyre up as we did not want to get charged for a repair and fill the gas up as we agreed to return it full. We did return the car later than the agreed time at 12.45 rather than the 12.00 we agreed on the contract. On return the lackey who checked it over indicated no problems so we happily caught the free bus shuttle back to Las Vegas airport from the car hire village. (yes they actually have a huge village with all the car hire companies under one roof away from the terminal) We then had a long wait as our flight was at 6.20pm to Los Angeles where we would stop over and then next day catch a plane to Costa Rica. While sitting waiting for our plane at Las Vegas, Kathy was taking full advantage of the free wifi when she noticed on my email account that we had a bill from the car hire company billing us for an extra $91.56. Thinking it was for the punctured tyre we were not surprised they had found it but on closer inspection found we had been billed for a whole days rental for returning the car 45 minutes late. We discussed it and came up with a plan to get the money back. Luckily in my former job I spent long hours reading contractual small print and had become quite a master of terminology so applied it to my phone call to the hire company. Anyway I locked horns with one of their customer representatives for over 30 minutes on the phone quoting their contract terms and conditions and eventually they succumbed to my badgering and refunded all our money. It's funny as we were just discussing what a waste of money it was that we had spent to buy a 21 day SIM card from T-Mobile as it was useless most of the time with either no coverage or Internet speed of a snail. In fact we had travelled for the last 9 months in Asia where most are 3rd world countries but in all of them the Internet was faster and more reliable on the phone than all our time in the U.S.A. They say it is the greatest nation on earth but their phone service is not. Anyway that 30 minute call redeemed our SIM card investment after all.

Well that's America played out.