Day 8

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Day 8!

I apologize for not having this up last night. We finally got into a hotel around 11 California time, about 1am STL time.

So we had a really big day today! We left William bright and almost early this morning, and drove to Seligman, AZ. Seligman takes their Route 66 heritage seriously, and you can tell from the Snow Cap. The Snow Cap is sort of like a diner, it serves burgers and malts, but it is all outdoor seating. . After Seligman we drove through Peach Springs, home of the Grand Canyon Caverns. We stopped there but we didnt go down in the caverns. After that, we headed for Valentine, AZ. There a brand new wildlife refuge was built, called Keepers of the Wild, which is now open to the public. We decided to stop there. We were given a tour and saw various big cats including, lynx, bobcats, lions, jaguars, and tigers. And other animals including, monkeys, turtles, emus, ostriches, burros. All of these animals will live at the refuge the rest of their lives. They were all abused animals. . After Valentine, we stopped at the Hackberry General Store for some pop. Pressing on, we drove through Kingman and on to Oatman. The road to Oatman took some really sharp turns around the Black Mountains, up and down, over and under, and all around them. . Oatman was a very western town, and everything closed at 5. Unfortunatly we arrived there at 4:59. Oatman was very interesting, in that wild burros roamed loose in the streets. . Just after Oatman we stopped at the Topock Marina for dinner, then drove across the state line into California. From the state line of AZ/CA we had about a 2 hour drive to Barstow, the next major town in CA. We considered taking the highway all the way there, since it was getting late, but this road trip was meant to drive Route 66 so thats what we did. Leaving the interstate, and placing 3 mountain ranges between us and the highway we continued to drive Route 66. We drove on for what seemed like forever, and saw absolutly no sign of civilization. We passed an old run down graffitied kiosk, remnants of many ghost towns. All of the towns on route 66 died off after the interstate was built. Finally the sun set and it was getting dark, and up ahead i was looking at a tree that looked like it had a bunch of black birds on it. We finally came up to it, and i saw that it was the Shoe Tree. It is a tree on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, with probably 100 pairs of shoes on it. People would tie their shoelaces of their shoes together and fling them onto the tree. Dad and i didnt know about the tree, so we didnt come prepared with an extra pair of shoes to contribute to the tree. . After the shoe tree, we finally hit the highway again all the way to Barstow, where we grabbed a hotel and stayed the night.

Animals we saw today:
- Rat snake (on the road)
- prairie dogs
- burros

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