Road to Nova Scotia

We drove just across the Arizona boarder and spent the next two days plotting our next course, doing laundry, and completing all of our post boondocking chores. During our course plotting we discovered a three day wind advisory and snowstorm was about to hit everywhere north of Flagstaff. After our little mud delay we decided it’d be best to avoid snow and potential ditches, so we pivoted away from heading to the Grand Canyon and rerouted to avoid the storm.

On this trip we’ve discovered casinos are great overnight stops with free parking and security patrolled lots. Meghan stumbled across Laughlin Nevada for an overnight stop at a casino. It was slow going getting there with some pretty wicked winds through parts of the desert. There was a brief moment I thought something was severely wrong when Meghan out of nowhere started screaming “EXIT EXIT EXIT, TAKE THIS EXIT!”, I obliged and then inquired about the impending doom that was upon us to require such a hasty exit off the highway and was met with, “CULVER’S! There’s a Culver’s!”. Fueled up on butter burgers and quick conversation of when it’s appropriate to scream like our life is on the line we continued down the road to Laughlin, on arrival we were surprised to find a bustling little casino town.

We discovered that Laughlin was a town founded by a man from Owatonna, Minnesota, Don Laughlin. He built the first casino there, The Riverside, in the 1960’s. Since then he expanded the casino from an eight room motel casino into a Vegas sized resort and helped to expand the town and create infrastructure. Laughlin is now the third largest gaming destination in Nevada behind Las Vegas and Reno. We also discovered a massive RV park connected to the casino where we decided to set up shop for the next few days as the storm blew over.

We enjoyed our time here nested on the crystal clear waters of the Colorado river. They had an antique car showroom that we walked through, a bowling alley for $6, and a fun little water taxi that would bring you up and down the river. We spent a lot of our time planning out the rest of our Arizona leg, we spoke with our best friend and wedding officiant Sonya who was about to have some rare time off from her residency and planned a get together to explore Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, we also talked with Hans who would be passing through the Flagstaff area in the following days and planned a rendezvous with him. The weather in the Flagstaff area post storm had been high 50’s-60’s, satisfied with the snow melt we started our climb from 500 feet above sea level to around 8,000.