New 2012: Birthdy

I’ve learned that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

The wind is really blowing and it sure is making a racket outside. It howled a good portion of the night too. Winds are about 33 mph with gusts to 45 mph. Well, that's what the weatherman is saying and you know how accurate he always is. This isn't one of those fun days to soak up southern sunshine in the great out of doors. Those winds seem to hang around way too long and they seem to show up just about the time we're thinking of getting on the road. We don't travel in those winds and neither do most of the folks we know. The wind has blown almost every day that we have been in the Bullhead City / Laughlin area. Perhaps that is the norm and not the exception.

We went to Oatman the other day. It wasn't our first time there. We had visited before. Oatman is an old mining town where gold was discovered in 1915. The town is mainly a tourist town. The local residents (burros) are the main attractions. They roam freely around the town and on the town streets. We were close so figured we might just go again. I’m not sure what we were looking for. We didn’t buy anything last time we were there and we didn’t buy anything this time either.

Oatman, Arizona

Not a big town and not a new town.

Actually, Oatman is just a short drive from the Bullhead City area so we figured we might as well go. The burros were still there. They were still on the town’s welcoming committee and the first ones to greet us.

Oatman's welcoming committee

They also hung around the town just in case you brought carrots with you. We didn’t have any. Last time they were real beggars. This time not so much.

Looks like this one was trying to eat our license plate.

It must have been nap time because there was no begging.

It was chilly. The few little showers we had the day before was just enough to leave dirt spots all over our car. It was also just enough to leave a dusting of snow in the mountains around Oatman. I think it made us even feel colder to see that snow but we had jackets with us and we had them on too.

Sandie wanted pictures of burros so I posted pictures of burros.

Maybe, it was lunch time.

Later in the day we discovered the outlet mall just across the river on the Nevada side. Again, our money stayed in our pockets and we didn’t buy a thing. However, when we left we were heading to the grocery store. Now there we spent a bundle!

The RV park we are at is ATV friendly in that we can ride our ATVs from our site to a couple off road trails surrounding the park. That’s not saying the trails are great. They aren’t but it just gave us a little opportunity to ride instead of leaving them on the trailer. This is what we did on Thursday. It wasn’t raining and the wind wasn’t blowing too bad. I connected my wonderful little GoPro Hero camera on and off we went.

The little GoPro Hero camera is working great. I can even use it to snap some freeze frames for blogging like below. One thing I discovered is that now that I’m doing all these videos I either have to erase them or buy a 3 TB external drive. My laptop hard drive filled up fast and I really don't want to transfer videos to my other external drives or it will fill them up too. It sounds like a trip to Fry's is going to happen when we get in Vegas.