Von Schmidt boundary
10 March: There was no more snarfage for the next 90 miles, so we got on the road and made good time.
A lot of people overtook us
Actually, there’s a historical marker at Vidal, but I got it in 2012, the year all those stolen historical markers were still there.
Just past Vidal Junction, I was very glad to be wearing full gear, as I drove through a small swarm of seemingly annoyed bees. Bzzzz bzzzz bzzzzz.
Slammed my visor down in the nick of time.
Vidal Junction
North of there, we missed a bunch of photos, because the battery went dead on the camera. I changed it at Needles, where we did a route check and didn’t buy expensive gas here.
Expensive gas
Tip: if you drive across the state line into Arizona, which is like, five minutes away, you can save a lot of money on gas.
We then picked up Needles Highway. This road to the left is a bit of old Route 66, but that wasn’t our goal today.
Needles Highway/River Road/Route 66
I was a bit surprised by Needles Highway. It’s not exactly a highway. It’s more like a two-lane road.
The surface moderately sucks
But at least there are ferrets.
We got a little confused when River Road split off to the right. This meant going down a very steep hill and doing a u-turn. Yeah, RV joy.
Road down to the river
That little detour cost us some daylight, but there was still enough twilight left to enjoy my goal, a fairly isolated triple historical marker cluster at the old Nevada state line. It’s a bit unusual. Here’s why:
There’s a California state historical marker here
There’s also a Nevada state historical marker here
And then there’s Von Schmidt’s boundary
The iron pillar is on the National Register of Historic Places. As I understand it, Von Schmidt’s team got the calculations slightly wrong, so the state line is three-fourths of a mile away. This corner is where Arizona, Nevada and California converge, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing this one for a while.
The monument stands on a bluff overlooking the valley, and we could easily see our night’s stay glowing in the dark ahead.
After that, my bike wouldn’t start, so we had to jumper it.
Ten minutes later we rolled into the Avi Casino and Resort free RV camping; I stopped while DH inspected the sign, and pfft. The bike refused to start again.
For extra credits, I’d stopped in a bit of a sand drift and could neither move forward nor backward, nor even put the side stand down. I had to be pushed out, or I’d've been stuck balancing the bike all night.
We went into the casino to get our permit, then came home and took showers and collapsed, utterly knackered, by nine o’clock.
This was cross-posted from Raven's Roads. You can comment here or there, but if you could bring yourself to comment there rather than here, that would be very nice. Here's the link to comment over there