Weekend Roundup

 Welcome to The Weekend Roundup...hosted by Tom The Back Roads Traveller

1. Starts with "Y" YOUR CHOICE
2. A Favorite
3 YESTERDAY - chosen by Tom

Starts with Y (BIGGEST/SMALLEST/LONGEST/SHORTEST/OLDEST/FIRST/SUNNIEST)

YUMA is known as the "Sunniest City on Earth," according to Guinness World Records, Yuma promises sunshine and warm weather at least 91% of the YEAR.

FAVOURITE

YELLOW Salt Lake City UT

YESTERDAY

Menu on our flight to Reykjavik Iceland

Day 8 Tucson AZ to Palm Springs CA

 January 15 2025

Day 1 Jan 8 Toronto - Dayton OH

Day 2 Jan 9 Dayton OH - Nashville TN

Day 3 Jan 10 Nashville TV - Conway AR

Weekly Recap

Day 4 Jan 11 Conway AR - Plano TX

Day 5 Jan 12 Plano TX - Odessa TX

Day 6 Jan 13 Odessa TX - Las Cruces NM

Day 7 Jan 14 Las Cruces NM - Tucson AZ

Dep 9 AM 3C

Arr 4PM  23C

Time Diff - minus 3 hours from Toronto

Tucson AZ - Palm Springs CA

3 bathroom breaks 2 gas stops 1 Yuma

We were on the road by 9. Getting out of Tucson was easy.

We opted for the slightly longer route on I - 8 towards San Diego rather than go through Phoenix.

It is a much more pleasant drive.

We stopped for a bathroom break and stretched our legs for a while.

A dairy farm.

VERY fresh milk!

We took a break in Yuma AZ. The link below for 2004 includes a trip to Yuma.

Known as the "Sunniest City on Earth," according to Guinness World Records, Yuma promises sunshine and warm weather at least 91% of the year, making this city a premier travel destination year-round. 

The San Carlos Hotel is a historic hotel in Yuma, Arizona. Its construction cost $300,000, and it was completed in 1930. It was five stories high, with 107 bedrooms. It was remodelled into 59 residential apartments in the 1980s.

The building was designed in the Art Deco architectural style by Dorr and Gibbs, a firm based in Los Angeles. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since April 12, 1984.

In 1994 Brian came to Gowan to build a business in Mexico that would provide growth and opportunity for the company and his employees. Walking the fields with farmers, Brian and his Tribe were men with muddy boots. They identified crop protection solutions that would create productivity and prosperity for their customers.

They nurtured the reputation of his young enterprise by leaving distinctive signs in customers' fields displaying the Calidad Gowan (Gowan Quality) logo to promote its on-target technology. This logo became synonymous with the quality products and remarkable service his flourishing business provided to Mexican farmers.

Gowan Company

Waiting for our smoothies.

California

California Border Protection Stations are 16 checkpoints placed at California's land borders with neighboring states and maintained by the CDFA for the purpose of monitoring vehicle traffic entering the state for the presence of cargo infested with pests.

And gas just got expensive!

The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline endorheic lake in Riverside and Imperial counties at the southern end of the U.S. state of California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough, which stretches to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The lake is about 15 by 35 miles (24 by 56 km) at its widest and longest. A 2023 report put the surface area at 318 square miles (823.6 km2).[1] The Salton Sea became a resort destination in the 20th Century, but saw die-offs of fish and birds in the 1980s due to contamination from farm runoff, and clouds of toxic dust in the current century as evaporation exposed parts of the lake bed.

Onto I-10 West (to LA) traffic is heavy as we enter Palm Springs.

Palm Springs CA

1991 Palm Springs 

1996 March Palm Springs and San Diego

1997 Palm Springs and Coastal Drive to SF

2000 Palm Desert Ramona San Diego Tijuana LA

2003 Los Angeles Palm Springs Death Valley CA

2004 Palm Springs CA Lake Havasu AZ Las Vegas NV Los Angeles CA

2008 Palm Springs and Route 66 Recap

October 2015 Recap

We checked into Oasis Resort, did groceries and RELAXED.

Weekend Roundup

 Welcome to The Weekend Roundup...hosted by Tom The Back Roads Traveler

1. Starts with "Y"
2. A Favorite
3.Yellow- chosen by Tom

Starts with "Y"

YELLOWSTONE National Park

FAVOURITE

YUMA AZ

YELLOW

Ballyvaughan Ireland

Déjà Brew

A catchall for leftover beer, coffee, food, motels and whatever catches my fancy!

Mazatlan Mexico

Palm Springs CA - Lake Havasu AZ - Las Vegas NV - Los Angeles CA

1991 Palm Springs 

1996 March Palm Springs and San Diego

1997 Palm Springs and Coastal Drive to SF

2000 Palm Desert Ramona San Diego Tijuana LA

2003 Los Angeles Palm Springs Death Valley CA

November 2004 - CA AZ NV

This is what happens when you go looking for a photo and then spend an hour cleaning up the folder. You come across real treasures!

On this trip we were based in Palm Springs for a week and then Lake Havasu AZ   for a week, in timeshare. We flew into Los Angeles, drove to Palm Springs, then to Lake Havasu and then a couple of days in Los Vegas.

Lake Havasu AZ

We spent a very long week in Lake Havasu, not somewhere that I would want to go to again. Although to be fair, if you are a boater or golfer there is plenty to do.

And the desert is always gorgeous.

The main attraction is London Bridge.

It was built in the 1830s and formerly spanned the River Thames in London, England. It was dismantled in 1967 and relocated to Arizona. The Arizona bridge is a reinforced concrete structure clad in the original masonry of the 1830s bridge, which was purchased by Robert P. McCulloch from the City of London. McCulloch had exterior granite blocks from the original bridge numbered and transported to America to construct the present bridge in Lake Havasu City, a planned community he established in 1964 on the shore of Lake Havasu. The bridge was completed in 1971 (along with a canal), and links an island in the Colorado River with the main part of Lake Havasu City. The song "London Bridge is Falling Down" is a nursery rhyme that predates the bridge's original 19th-century construction.

The 1831 London Bridge was the last project of engineer John Rennie and was completed by his son, John Rennie the Younger. By 1962, the bridge was not sound enough to support the increased load of modern traffic, and it was sold by the City of London.

PALM SPRINGS CA
We'd been coming to Palm Springs since 1991.

Gay Parade

YUMA AZ

Around the time the railroad arrived, a full century after its founding by Spanish missionaries, Yuma was the site of Arizona Territory’s main prison.

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Convicts struggled in the 120°F heat to build the stone and adobe prison, which earned a reputation as the “Hellhole of Arizona,” due in large part to the summer heat and the brutality of its regime, though park rangers emphasize the fact that prisoners had access to a library and other facilities unusual at the time. It operated 33 years until it was closed in 1909 and is now preserved as the state-run Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park, the site consists of a few of the cells and the main gate, as well as a small museum.

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From the prison, a rickety pedestrian-only steel bridge (formerly part of US-80) leads across the Colorado River to California and the St. Thomas Indian Mission church on the Quechan Fort Yuma Indian Reservation.

We also visited Oatman AZ.

Oatman was named in honor of Olive Oatman, who as a young girl, was kidnapped by an Apache tribe, sold toMojave Indians and later rescued in a trade in 1857 near the current site of the town. Oatman was served by a narrow gauge rail line between 1903 and 1905 that ran 17 miles to the Colorado River near Needles, California.

But both the population and mining booms were short-lived. In 1921, a fire burned down many of the smaller shacks in town, and three years later, the main mining company, United Eastern Mines, shut down operations for good.
Oatman survived by catering to travelers on old U.S. Route 66. But in the 1960s, when the route became what is now Interstate 40, Oatman almost died.

The burros are tame and can be fed.

The Oatman Hotel, built in 1902, is the oldest two-story adobe structure in Mojave County and has housed many miners, movie stars, politicians and other scoundrels. The town was used as the location for several movies such as How The West Was Won, Foxfire and Edge of Eternity.
Clark Gable and Carol Lombard honeymooned at the Oatman Hotel March 18, 1939.

Then we went to Kingman AZ.
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Who knew back then that when we retired we would often pass this town on our way to and from Las Vegas.

Las Vegas NV

We made our first of many visits to the Hoover Dam and our second visit to Las Vegas, the first was in 1991!

The New Frontier (formerly Last Frontier and The Frontier) was a hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the second resort that opened on the Las Vegas Strip and operated continuously from October 30, 1942 until it closed on July 16, 2007. The building was demolished on November 13, 2007.The land is now owned by Crown Resorts who abandoned their project to build the Alon Las Vegas in May 2017 and put it up for sale.

Sadly, gone also.

LOS ANGELES
We were heading to the airport and only spent some time around Olvera St. near Chinatown and Union Station.