Sedona to Needles via Oatman (Route 66)

Everyone, at some point in their life, should drive through the town of Oatman, CA. It's not so much that Oatman is spectacular, but the drive between it and Kingman, AZ is one of my favorites. 

Originally, I had planned this:
Nia at Dancessense Studio, which meant today's drive would have been nearly 8 hours on the Int and getting up in the morning to teach class.
But it got cancelled due to lack of registrations, so I was able to cut today's drive into two parts and make the detour using the Oatman Highway.  
First, we stopped in Williams, AZ so I could eat a sandwich and River could pose on a giant rock.

This was the real authentic feeling historic highway. I got on Route 66 in Williams but got off in Seligman because it veered too far from my destination, and it wasn't too interesting out there. But in Kingman, I got back on the Mother Road and took a beautiful ride through the Mohave Desert and over the Sitgreaves Pass. This is some of the most winding and scenic roads I know of. It blows my mind. And it takes two hands to drive so I have no evidence of it. Just trust me, take the ride.


And the town of Oatman is kind of fun. It's "Where the Burros Run the Town". And it's true. The main feature of the town is free-roaming burros everywhere and tourists snapping photos of them. I think you can buy a bag of food to feed them and the roads are covered with poop. It takes about 50 seconds to drive through the town at 20 MPH. I captured only the briefest of videos because it was too risky to hold the camera.



There's a lot of empty road in the desert. But if you look carefully you can be entertained for hours. This is a little taste of what I mean...

This is the stretch of highway where you can find the old Burma-Shave sign ads. I saw several sets of them. Let's see if I can remember any. 

Listen Birds
These Signs cost Money
So Roost a While
But Don't Get Funny
Burma-Shave

He tried to pass
As fast train neared
Death didn't Draft him
He volunteered.
Burma-Shave

If hugging on the highway
Is your Sport
Trade your Car In
For a Davenport
Burma-Shave

'Twould Be more Fun
To Go by Air
If We Could Put 
These Signs Up There
Burma Shave

Cattle Crossing
Means Go Slow
That Old Bull
Is Some Cow's Beau
Burma Shave

If Daisies Are
Your Favorite Flower
Keep Pushing Up
Those Miles Per Hour
Burma-Shave

You Could Drive
A Mile A Minute
But There Is
No Future In It
Burma-Shave



As soon as I crossed over into California, I noticed it was about ten degrees hotter. And today, there was no pleasant cloud cover so I got the full force of it.

Needles is right near the Arizona-California state line and that's where I stopped for the night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nude Stretching

Image
I never thought I’d do something like this. But over the years many people have suggested that I make a Nude Stretching Video.  I guess the fact that I’m comfortable with nudity and with my body and that I’m a fitness pro with a passion for helping people made it seem like a no-brainer that I create something like this.  But I’ve been resistant to doing it for a long time; for fear (I guess) of what the more conservative people might think.  Now, finally, I’ve succumbed to the requests and put something together.  You conservative people will just have to look the other way. :) Now, I haven’t made an X-rated video here; I'm just nude and I'm stretching.  It's completely natural. This video blends a smart, educational stretching session with  “Warhol-like” video interludes accentuating an eroticized appreciation of the male form.  My intention was that it could be enjoyed on two levels. The free-style, hand-held segments demonstrate the positi...
Read more

Routines From the Vault

Image
I’ve been teaching Nia for 16 years now. And most of those years, I’ve gotten four new routines from Nia. That comes out to over 60 routines over the years. I’ve also created quite a few of my own routines. And along the way, certain routines have fallen out of favor for one reason or another.  For example, a great routine called Commitments, which uses the music from the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, is one of my first ones. I learned that routine so long ago that I have the music on cassette tape and I watched the routine on VHS. It has been retired “To the Vault” for many years. Ditto for routines called Genesis, Roots and Adagio. Some routines have been taken apart and used to build other routines. For example I took all of the Angelique Kidjo songs from the classic, Agolo, and put together a routine using only songs from her album, Aye (which means "LIFE" and is the name of the routine as well.)  I split up the songs from the repetitive routine Fi...
Read more

Food Purist

Image
I tell people I’m a food purist. And I say I’m gastronomically conservative.  Sometimes these terms are misunderstood. These terms that, as far as I know, I’ve made up; I don’t see them commonly used this way, but I could easily have picked them up subconsciously and adopted them. When something is so universally true, as I think food purism is, you often see the same or similar permutations of the concept showing up in different places. Anyway, being a food purist doesn’t mean that I only eat the foods that offer the best nutrition per calorie, or the foods with the highest antioxidant levels or the most enzymes or the least fat or the lowest glycemic index, etc. etc. That’s all popular science and I don’t get bogged down in it. All of that is changing constantly, anyway: One day eggs are good for you, the next day, you can only have whites, then they’re good for you again, then you find out they’re bad for you. Not that I’m saying anything about eggs right now, but this...
Read more