More Havasu BLM - Windy Travel to Bullhead City

The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Most importantly:  Congratulations Sandie and Jim on selling your motorhome!!

We drove through Needles, California on our way north.  On our trip south a few months ago we had stayed at the Elks in town.  The RV parking at this Elks is really nice.  The sites are long, pull-thrus and with full hookups for $16 a night.  We think it’s quite a deal.  Needles isn’t a busy town.  Not a lot of snowbirds hang around the town even though there are a few great RV parks. We think they probably head towards the Laughlin area and its casinos to play.   What we did notice is that Needles is on the old Route 66.  Actually, it wasn't hard to notice that.

We’ve spent just a little bit of time scoping out Bullhead City and hope to do a lot more.  One place I wanted to visit was Davis Camp.  It’s a Mohave County park and located just across the river from the huge casinos that Laughlin, Nevada are known for.  The park has a couple boat ramps plus rents cabins and RV sites.  Some of these sites even have full hookups.  However, the best sites are those right along the river. Some have concrete pads and covered picnic tables.  However, what they do not have are hookups. 

Davis Camp Sites

After being in the desert for nearly two months without a soaking pool, we’re glad to be planted with full hookups for a week.  Our site is fine.  There is plenty of room for our motorhome, the trailer and the car.  Matter of fact, the site is larger than most RV parks.  It's longer but not wider.  However, we’ve had some pretty big sites the last few months and this one is the smallest of all.  Of course, most of those sites have been on BLM land but not all.  We know it’ll be a while before we get to experience the wide open spaces again and we miss it already.

Riverfront site at Davis Camp -- Laughlin, Nevada in background

We’ve been struggling with the wind just a little bit. Folks say that the wind seems to blow a lot in this area. Since we’ve not spent much time here in the past, we’re hoping it’s a little exaggerated. Only time will tell on that one but I’m thinking it might be true. The deal with an RV is that you can really hear that wind howl from the inside and we don’t like it one little bit!

We have some things we want to see around here but first we have to get through the local winds.  Getting here was no piece of cake either.  I’m constantly amazed at how the weather forecast can be wrong so often.  In Arizona the forecasters are very good at predicting sunny days because that's fairly common.  It’s the changes to that where they go wrong.  Such was the case on the day we were heading into the Bullhead City area.  High winds were forecast for Monday but not for Sunday until the wind started blowing early that morning.  Then, the forecast was changed to reflect that.  It was almost changed on the hour.

One of the online weather websites I like to connect to is wunderground.com.  The velocity of the wind is close to "live" on their website.   It wasn’t a good day to plan on moving but we kept watching the forecast and listening to the howling.  We knew the next day would be bad too.  Well, at least we thought it would be.

Winds - 47 mph	Winds - 41.3 mph

When the high wind warning was finally posted it was due to start calming down by 11:00 AM.  Closer to that time it was changed  to 1 PM, then 2 PM and then 3 PM.   It was a head wind and not a side wind.  We figured we could go.  We did but certainly didn’t see many other RVs on the  road.  Travel was uneventful and eventually the winds died down but that was even after we arrived at our new RV park and everything had been put in its place.

There are casinos to visit, dams to tour, ATVs to ride,  Lake Mohave, petroglyphs and even Oatman to revisit.  That’s the plan once we get the Quartzsite and Yuma dust out of the motorhome.  I just hope we can do it all in the short time we’ll be here.

Update:     -----------------------------------------------------------

This sign is supposed to be on Hwy 95.  We did not see it.

On my previous post I mentioned we could not find the BLM north of the Lake Havasu airport.   I've discovered that Craggy Wash is the name of that BLM area.  Evidently there is a dirt road that we were supposed to turn off on and then drive about 1/2 mile on before we would see any RVs.  We didn't find the road and we didn't see the RVs.  It actually sounds like a perfect spot to stay close to town and best of all, it was free. I also found this --- N 3435.610  W 11420.982 -- about mile marker 190.  Another campsite area at mile marker 192 is Blankenship Wash.  We didn't see that either but here's a great website (where I "borrowed" the picture) for additional information.  I'm not sure if information is current or not.  Also, check out this website with maps to five BLM areas around Lake Havasu.  Again, make sure information is current before you go.



One more thing ---  I had also heard someplace that it was impossible to get internet with your Verizon aircards in Lake Havasu.  We have an aircard from Mellenicom that connects through the Verizon cell towers.  Our internet was great.

Previous post A little Bit of Lake Havasu.

‘Tis life on the road.