Route 66 Day 25: California or Bust

We woke early this morning to talk further with the rental car agency after our rental car stranded us last night (See our Route 66 Day 24: A Close Shave blog post).

The agency was again very helpful, and made arrangements for us to visit the local rental agency office in Kingman. In fact, it was just past the corner we got stranded at last night! With a few hours before the office opened, we decided to go out for breakfast. We crossed our fingers and got in the rental car. The car started right up, and we drove a short distance down the road to Rutherford’s 66 Diner. Art planned for us to eat at the diner as it was on the way to the local rental car office, so if anything happened, we weren’t far away.

After a nice breakfast, we headed over to the rental car agency. Aimee, the branch manager was wonderful! She came out to look at the car with us, and talked about what happened. Even though the car started up, she agreed we needed a new one. When she went out a second time to try the car- it was dead. Aimee couldn’t push the start button, shift it, nothing, the same experience we had the night before.

Isn’t it nice when a problem is reproducable! Usually the opposite happens! So to make a rather long story short…..this happened.

Bye car! We had a blast with you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Kingman, Arizona.

Aimee took great care of us, and soon we were on our way with a new rental car, feeling more confident we might make it to California today!

We left Kingman and headed back onto Route 66.

This next leg of the drive was going to be fun!

The Byway runs through The Sitgreaves Pass in the Black Mountains. The 50 mile long road through the pass is called the Oatman Highway. It’s elevation is 3586 feet. In just 8 of those miles there are 191 turns! Oh, and did we mention…no guardrails! Here we go!

Hopefully no one uses this rest stop!

This was one of the last stops before heading up through the pass.

Hopefully we fare better!

The views were breathtaking, along with the sheer drops, off the side of the road. I’m glad Art couldn’t see those!

You can see the stretches of white road through the center of the photo.

To give you an idea of the size of the cliffs and rock formations, there is a motorcyclist entering the photo on the lower right side.

Art’s View From The Driver’s Seat:

These were the tightest curves and narrowest roads on cliffs I’ve ever been on. As I was focusing on the oncoming traffic and staying in my lane, I could not see the cliffs, but I could tell how steep they were by the gasping sounds Deb made.

Once we got off the roller coaster, we traveled on more straightaways. We encountered several burros. They have NO fear of cars, in fact they seem to have perfected the art of walking down the middle of the road and into your path, even when you try to move around them, they move to block you. This one came up to my window, and had we not kept going I’m sure he would have had his head in the car looking for some food.