Laughlin/Bullhead City

While in Kingman, we camped in an area known as Golden Valley, an unincorporated town northeast over a mountain range from city of Kingman.  We camped in a Passport American Park – Tradewinds -- that caters largely to frugal snowbirders; they have a monthly rate of $200 plus electric.  The grounds were all packed crushed stone with old farm equipment for decoration.

Another attraction of this park is that it is less than 20 miles to the Colorado River and the casinos of Laughlin, Nevada and its companion city of Bullhead City, Arizona.  But within that 20 mile stretch there is a elevation drop of  over 3,000 feet down to the river.  It still amazes us the cuts this river has made over the eons of time.

We made two trips down to the river.  The first was at night.  It was very dark that night even with the lights of the casinos of Laughlin down the road.  With a continuous down grade of 6% for about 12 miles it was a little scary in the desert darkness on a road we had never traveled.  We stopped at the brewpub of the Colorado Belle Casino.  There brews were not all that good.  They had more than a bit of diacetyl in them.  This is the taste of butterscotch in beer that is given off by the yeast early in the fermentation process.  But it you give the yeast a chance, it will clean up after itself and reabsorb this off taste.  Unfortunately some small breweries rush the process and pull the beer off of the yeast before the reabsorption occurs and the butterscotch taste is left in the beer.

I cashed in a free play from our casino coupon book and turned it into a whopping $5.  Our poker pro played a tournament but didn’t have any luck.

On our second trip to the river, we didn’t go to any casinos.  We were hungry and went to a Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner and wound up staying and playing a few hours of Buzztime Trivia.  It is a trivia game that is fed by satelllite to a number of of bars and restaurants across the US and Canada.  At the end of each game your receive statistics for your establishment as well as across all locations and for all players.  We had one game where we had the second highest score on the network.

Oh, and one last note.  We were able to buy regular unleaded in the Kingman area for $2.98 a gallon.  If memory serves us correctly -- and that would be a huge assumption -- this is the first time we have paid less than $3 a gallon in the over two years that we have been fulltiming.  Now, if only the days would return when diesel prices were lower than than gasoline………………