Author: The Buchanans Rolling Down The Road

What can be said, about a crusty old curmudgeon, with no fixed address … not much I guess.

Vegas…Baby

February 10th 2020

We head to Vegas today, it is less than three hours up the road…but I suspect it will take us about five hours…we have been in the desert for two and a half months, and things are a little dusty. So a spa day for Thunder is in order, and most of our route is state highway so most of it is just two lane road. I started to write a blog yesterday but it just never happened…I know most of you find it hard to believe that I had nothing to say…well that isn’t totally true but I was having trouble trying to be politically correct enough to put in print, with what I was reading and thinking. I think the most alarming finding, is that after swiping through Facebook it’s just hard for me to believe that so many people are taking what they read on Facebook book as the truth… People you have to fact check what you read to assure your self it is true, and for heaven sakes don’t share something you haven’t checked.

But back to Las Vegas, Miss Laurie and I love Vegas, we love the excitement of the strip, we love all that happens in and around Vegas, oh there are all kinds of tourist traps, there are also some of the most amazing shows, the grandeur of the casinos, the way Vegas keeps reinventing it self, it is truly a city that never sleeps, but is surrounded by so many amazing land marks, Hoover Dam, Red Rock park, Death Valley, and so many other things to keep you busy doing something.

Well we are settled into our spot in Las Vegas, the sites are tight (we knew they were it’s Vegas) so every place you look at is tight, most people don’t come here for the season, no we are one of the longer term visitors. Well the trip here was not without some drama…we had another fuel filter issue…if you remember back in early November we had a fuel issue after some bad fuel, and had to change the primary fuel filter in Oklahoma and have had no issues since, well that was until today and while climbing into Kingman on I-40 we started to have the same stumbling effect. We were headed to Kingman to refuel and to the Blue Beacon truck wash…now I had to add changing the fuel filter to the list.

At the Pilot Flying J, we topped up tank with fifty gallons of diesel fuel, we then found an open parking lot where I changed the fuel filter, then off to the truck wash to clean up our act…and a couple of hours later we are headed north on US-93 toward the Hoover Dam and Nevada. We had left our spot on Plamosa Road at around 9 am and were settled into Arizona Charlie’s RV park in Las Vegas by 3.30 pm, so a little longer that I had planned, but I hadn’t planned on the fuel issue which had us just creeping up some of the grades near Kingman. All in all it was a good drive, light traffic, good weather, and while we tried a little different route through California which was an easier drive was very flat and straight but not as scenic as the road through Lake Havasu.

We are settled, with full hookups, the plan for the rest of the day, is just relaxing, we have passed through another time zone so we are now in the Pacific time zone which puts three hours behind our home residence. This little park has a round two hundred sites, but has a small foot print, there are obviously a number of units that are here long term, but at $850 a month all inclusive not a bad rent factor for someone moving for work.

Tomorrow we are hooking up with some Vegas newlyweds, there are lots of newlyweds in Vegas but we know these newlyweds from our previous life in the Niagara region…so stay tuned.

Nellie E Saloon (Desert Bar)

February 8th 2020

It’s Saturday! And we are going to the Desert Bar! We started out to go to the desert bar two years ago with Paul and Lorena from “The Motothome Experiment” and as we were loading into their vehicle some more of their fans pulled into the spot in La Posa West that we were sharing. George and Jean they were travelling in their Oliver tag a long, and while not yet full timers they do take extended trips from their home base in Phenix-City Alabama. But today we are going for sure…in fact there are seven of us going, I will introduce all the gang members with a photo a little later on.

History of the Desert Bar

Ken Coughlin, founder of this saloon, built the Desert Bar at the site of an old copper mining camp in 1975. Although all remnants of the original camp are gone, its spirit lives, its parking lot is located directly on the site where the mining camp once stood. At first, the saloon was a three-sided enclosed room, not much bigger than a small storage shed. Today, while maintaining its Old West character, Coughlin has expanded it substantially. The original bar portion still exists with the bar and a few tables, and is now also home to the souvenir store that sells a variety of shirts and beer can cozies, it occupies the area I suspect was the kitchen area of the original bar. With new construction going on at a number of different areas…the bar is growing again, now mainly open to the elements the structures are mainly steel and concrete, but every thing just seem to fit.

“Quirky, rustic watering hole, built on the site of a former mining camp, open weekends Oct–Apr” that is one of the descriptions online for the Desert Bar…what it didn’t say was that it is best accessible by four wheel drive, down five miles of twisting turning rough road, the bar is off the grid, no cellular or data, CASH only, kind of place. Only open Saturday and Sunday only except long weekends, and only during from noon till 6 pm, they boast of live music, cold beer, good food in an open air atmosphere totally run on solar…there you go I said it but I held off mentioning it for three paragraphs.

Now the Nellie E Saloon is not a place you are going to go every weekend, the road into and out of it jars you to that reality quickly, but for sure it’s a once a season kind of a place, in fact it is almost a must see if you are anywhere near. None of the write ups really do it justice so I thought I would try to do a better job of explaining the Nellie E Saloon but as I tackled it is much more difficult that you would think, as it’s such an eclectic collection of number of items and structures.

This structure known as the church is a solid steel structure with a copper roof to honour of the old copper mine on which it stands on, this solid steel structure is only around three feet (one meter) wide and has a massive set of concrete steps leading up to it, and is little more that a photo opportunity. Here is our group counter clockwise from the bottom right: Bob, Shari, Larry, Laurie, myself, Francine, and Gilles

Every direction you look, opens a whole new bunch of questions. The large tower in the center is a huge swamp cooler, the roof line to the right of the umbrellas is actually the original Nellie E Saloon, the roof on the left covers the horse shoe pits.

This photo shows the large steel structures that support huge solar arrays but are designed more to provide much needed shade from the Arizona sun, the rusty one in the middle was the one that our group was under, as we enjoyed lunch, the band, and a few cold (solar chilled) beers.

The bar offered a number of options for lunch, all where pub food, the fare on the main area with the band offered burgers (no cheese ever), hot dogs and such but we had been told to get our food downstairs and there was about twenty item variety on an extensive menu, this is a sample of our selection.

Some of our RV family…posing like rock stars…just saying