From Laughlin, Nevada

Hello from the KOA Kampground on the grounds of the Avi Casino, on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, just south of Laughlin, Nevada!

It has been a long time since my last posting. The main reason was intermittent to non-existent Internet access in the campgrounds in which we have stayed. To bring you up to date, we moved from the Moab area to Springdale, Utah, just outside Zion National Park. During the time we were parked there, we toured both Zion and Bryce Canyon National Park, which lies about 86-miles to the north. We treated ourselves to two nights in a Bryce Canyon Lodge cabin and one in a Zion Canyon Lodge cabin.

From Springdale, we moved to Page, Arizona and the Glen Canyon/Lake Powell area. There was much to do in and around Page. We were not able to do everything we had hoped to do there and look forward to our next visit. We did have a couple of nice paddles on Lake Powell, which is a very special place to paddle. The slot canyons and vertical rock formations jutting up out of the water are not found anywhere else, I believe. Our drives to Lee's Ferry on the Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam and to the Horseshoe Bend were memorable.

From Page, we moved briefly to Echo Bay on Lake Mead. The wind was blowing very hard there and getting into the water appeared to be impossible and no one could give us much hope that things would change for the better. Without TV or Internet access in the campground on election night, we made the decision to parlay our money on one night in the Echo Bay Resort Hotel where we had both. We had both the hotel and the restaurant virtually to ourselves as the combination of season, weather and the election rendered this place a virtual "ghost town".

We move to our current location just outside Laughlin, NV. Since arriving here, we have visited Oatman, AZ, a turn of the century gold mining town on the old Route 66 where they still have "gun fights" in the street along with burros wandering and panhandling for carrots. We also paddled the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge and walked around the "casino strip" in Laughlin. We still have several days here before moving on to Death Valley for some "dry camping". The Avi Casino of which our KOA is a part is a nice complex run by the Fort Mojave Tribe of Indians. Neither Karen or I are attracted by the gambling, but the buffet is very good as we found out last night!

Please visit my Flickr account, http://www.flickr.com/, for the best of my pictures from our stay in Springdale and Page. Because of the poor Internet signal at night, there are two uploads that mix pictures from different times and places which might be confusing. Sorry for that...