John Wise

This is another one of those blog posts that might have never been if it weren’t for my desire to build a comprehensive index of all of our travels. For more than a few years, I’ve been returning to old directories of photos and teasing out the exact days we were away from Phoenix. On more than a few occasions I find trips of which not a word or photo was ever shared. While on a lot of old posts, there were a minimum of images due to bandwidth issues at the time; I’m flummoxed how some trips never found their way up here. So here August 8th, 2022, I’ve brought together the best photos from this quick two-day getaway, and now I have to craft something or other to say because there’s nothing.

First up is an easy one; you see, back in 2001, Caroline and I passed right through here. On that day, this sign appeared to still be perfect, but here on the day I’m writing this in 2022, the Burro Jim Motel in Aguila, Arizona, is dead and gone. Click here to visit that trip from 2001.

The Sunset Motel in Wenden is defunct, too, though it probably was so even back in 2009. Knowing that we were traveling from Phoenix to Aguila and then Wenden allowed me to start determining the direction of our trip, and that made it a bit easier to put things back together.

I’ve looked for information about this old stone building with horse tie-ups still out front here in Salome but have never found anything.

You enter Hope and just as quickly are leaving Hope behind.

Old Brayton Ghost Town & Museum near Bouse, Arizona, was already fading fast here in 2009, but somewhere between then and 2022, it was removed from the map.

This old stuff makes me curious about driving out this route once again and seeing how things have changed in the intervening years. Heck, for all I know, I’ll stumble upon another directory of photos featuring this exact trek.

That’s the Colorado River with California on the left and Arizona on the right. We are traveling north on State Route 95.

This is the Bill Williams National Wildlife Refuge, and in the over 25 years we’ve lived in Arizona, we have yet to hike its short trails; this must be fixed.

Caroline posing while holding her knitting with Jutta can only mean one thing: it’s World Wide Knit in Public Day.

Okay, Caroline, we get it; you are knitting in public. Yeah, but when has anyone else ever knitted in public on Historic Route 66?

When you travel the broad expanse of Interstate 40, you can only wonder why the original highway planners of Route 66 brought the road through areas such as this. Talk about being off the beaten path.

I would have bet $100 there was NO chance we’d be seeing burros on this road.

And then all of a sudden, you have two of them jamming their heads into your car, pleading that we take them with us or feed them. It’s probably the latter, as who has ever seen a burro in the backseat of a car?

Good thing I didn’t bet $100 per burro.

Nothing like a braying burro to get others to laugh with them.

The sign, aside from telling us about gold mining in the area, warns visitors to avoid the burros as they are wild and will bite and kick. Later, we also found out that local shops sell carrots to tourists as burro food, which makes some of them rather fat. Interestingly, fat donkeys carry a lot of their extra weight on their necks.

Apparently, the burros are either domesticated by now due to all the visitors feeding them, or they’ve come out to politely watch the knitting-in-public-day festivities.

At this point in identifying our road trip, I got lost on the map for quite a while.

From where the next day started photographically, it only made sense that we stayed in Kingman, Arizona, for the night.

But these photos looked like nothing around Kingman.

Joshua trees and vermillion cliffs weren’t triggering our memories, so both Caroline and I continued scouring StreetView on Google Maps, trying to find something from our photos that would hint at our location.

It turned out that we went in a very unintuitive direction, far away from either of our best guesses.

This overlook is on Pierce Ferry Road, which travels out to Meadview, Arizona, as we were approaching South Cove Marina. We turned around at this point as there were over 70 miles ahead of us that would need nearly 90 minutes to cover before we’d reach somewhere for dinner. This is how we wander into the Old West.