Down By The River

I went for a walk out to the entrance to the campground and back, probably about a mile or so, before getting underway this morning. We pulled out and went north to Interstate 40, then west over the Colorado River into California, north to Needles (a real dump), back over the Colorado into Arizona, north through Bullhead city, to Davis Camp, a county park (N35 11 21.4, W114 34 11.1), just over an hour's drive. Just to keep me on the ball, in Needles our GPS lady led us around a corner to a railway underpass that had 8 foot clearance. Miss Travelaire stands about 10 1/2 feet tall. It was good that I wasn't daydreaming at the time, and I managed to stop and turn around without taking Miss Travelaire's head off.

 

Davis Camp is one of our favorite campgrounds; I think this is our fourth time we've visited this site. Here we are in site 22, on the banks of the Colorado River beneath towering palm trees.

 

Up here, the other side of the Colorado is Nevada rather than California. So, of course, just down the river from our camp are a bunch of Casinos, which are in the town of Laughlin. But directly across the river from us is a barren mountain.

 

Although this is for the most part a very peaceful place, there are some distractions. One, such annoyance is the proximity to a military training facility, and periodically these training airplanes fly by. For the size of them, they are extremely noisy!

 

The river has annoyances now and again also. There is the odd jet ski goes by to put an end to the peace and quiet.

 

And the odd tour boat passes by, although they aren't really loud like the jet ski.

 

The place is full of birds, like these Malard Ducks. There are hundreds and hundreds of these that float by in the strong current of the river. Then all of a sudden they all take off and fly upstream, and float back again. The last time we stayed here, we fed a couple of ducks some peanuts. Within a few minutes we had every duck in the place in our campsite! We didn't make that mistake this time.

 

In the evening, as I was sitting out by the river, a lady came along and asked, "Are you waiting for the birds?" She said pretty soon one bird will come and land on the wire that stretches across the river. Then another will come, then move will come, until the wire will have birds lined up from shore to shore. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. The birds were preparing to roost for the night (They're Cormorants I'm pretty sure.)

 

And they provided about an hour's entertainment, as they don't get along at all. So as one bird would land, another bird would move over and peck at it until it had to take off again. They squabbled like this until it got so dark that they all had to settle down and resign themselves to the fact that they would have to get along or it was going to be too dark to fly.

 

As it got dark, the lights of the casinos were pretty shining across the still water.