American Southwest Day 10: Road to Kingman

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The Lost Memory Card

About 20 miles outside of Sedona, in the old mining town of Jerome, we fortunately stopped to check out the shops in town and I flipped the camera on to get ready to take some pictures since the view was great only to realize the miniscule micro-SD card was missing. I ripped into my briefcase, not in the laptop either. Uh oh. I had just been messing with it at l'Auberge, trying to download the pictures onto the laptop harddrive, wondering why the computer kept locking up when I referenced the F: drive. We called the bunch of incompetents at l'Auberge which was a waste of time so we had to kill an hour and a half so I could go find it in the room that the housekeeper had "cleaned" in five seconds. So much for good help.

For the record . . . l'Auberge de Sedona SUCKS. Stay at the Hilton. It may be a Hilton, but at least I can stay there for free - and it does not suck.

Route 66

We got back on track and went back through Jerome, then Prescott, which is actually a cool town where we ate at a local dive in the little main square/street area which was well preserved around the old city hall. You would not expect to find an old town area doing well retail-wise, kind of like Lawrence, Kansas. We hopped on Route 66 at Seligman and went all the way to Kingman and it was not anything special other than the fact that there are no gas stations, no cops, and not too many other cars on. Perfect setting for a Twilight Zone episode. Was tame for us though. There are a couple corny tourist traps here and there, including the one that sucked us in - the Grand Canyon caverns. A triumphant little motel and chatchky store sits on the highway with a sign the size of it out front. Signage is limited to the caverns so that you hopefully go into the aforementioned first. We wind our way back, speed limited posted at 4 MPH, then 7 MPH. I go 30 MPH, didn't get pulled over okay. We get to this building with the big dinosaur outfront, not sure what the relation is, a couple other lost tourists here and there like us. We go inside, big chatchky cafeteria and store attached. Finally find the entrance to caverns, tours are on the hour, something like $15 per person. It's the half hour right now. We check out the chatchkies and catch the tail end of the previous tour. Wow, that's pretty lame, the little tour lady belting out in a monotone voice facts about junky-looking items in a poorly lit glass case . . . we'll pass, thank you very much.

Kingman

The best thing happening in Kingman is the Hampton Inn & Suites and the In N' Out Burger down the street, we got some enjoyment from both. The city seems to be doing well and sprawls to the north towards the airport. The old town is dead, a sharp change from Prescott, some interesting older buildings, a large old locomotive seemingly surrounded by tourists at all hours, but not much else going on. It's all happening at the Wal-Mart across the street from the Hampton my friends. There is also notably no theatre in this town of 25,000 or so, and we wonder still what else there is to do around here otherwise. Apparently the dilapidated old theatre had closed a few months before and was horrible anyway.

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