Wickenburg & Prescott

I've been in the US only a few days and I've already dialled 911! Not for me, though.

It happened this morning, as I was driving from Wickenburg to Prescott. Since I left Phoenix yesterday, the desert has been pretty flat. On the road to Prescott, however, it starts to climb onto what I think is the colorado plateau.

The road starts to get really torteous. Half-way up the climb, I saw a motorbike laid down on the side of the road, and the biker standing near the railing. It looked like he had just fallen off his bike. The guy was a bit confused. Without hesitating long I pulled over and asked from a distance if he was alright. He still had his helmet and he was alone, which I found a bit odd. I was a bit scared to be honest. I couldn't help thinking that maybe it was some sort of scam to get the tourist to stop and then someone else would come out of nowhere and take my money. So my reflex was to call 911. When I know that someone is coming, then I can get close to the guy and see if I could help.

I'm not used to call for emergency, so I had to explain very vaguely the situation to 3 or 4 persons over the phone. By that time, another guy had pulled over with a truck, assessed the situation and very calmly started to get cones out of his truck to secure the roadside. He then checked the guy out with me and only then called 911, giving informations such as "He is coherent", etc. That made me think I need to get on a first-aid training!

Pretty soon an ambulance arrived. Then fire men. Then police men. All in all, there came something like 6 vehicles all with sirens and blinking lights! I thought it was a bit overkill.

The biker is safe. I think he might have a dismantled/broken shoulder. :-( But he's alive and well. It turned out he stopped to take pictures a bit further down, which is why his mates where not with him. But they soon came back. They all thanked me for stopping. I didn't feel very useful though, to be honest! I'll think about this first-aid training.

Yesterday, I left Phoenix and drove in the desert up to Wickenburg, a small gold mining town.

A few miles away, there's an old abandonned "ghost" gold mine called the Vulture Mine. There I met with Gayle and Gordon, a couple of friends that kind of guided me around.

Gordon used to be a pilot in the military and I believe he is now retired. Arizona´s weather is great for pilots as it allows them to fly so many days a year. He loves old places like for example the Vulture Mine and the city of Jerome which I´ll see tomorrow. It was very interested listening to his slow American voice as he explained things about the mine, cactus, rattlesnakes, etc...

Gayle is a very enthusiastic person. She used to play piano and sing blues in clubs, before selling credit cards to movie stars (including Jon Voight, Angelina Jolie´s dad, which reminded me of an episode of Jerry Seinfeld...!), and then taking an early retirement. It was a lot of fun to hang out with both of them.

After the mine, we went back to Wickenburg to have a drink in one of the ¨Salloon¨. We talked a bit about the US. Cars, cities, religion and guns, amongst other things.

Then I found a campground to pitch the tent before dark. It was very near a very busy road. I have no idea why, but big huge trucks have this habit of honking for like a second or two several times in a row. I´ll have to find out what for, because it sure was annoying.

Then as you know I headed to Prescott. There, I visited the Sharlot Hall Museum. It's a bit funny how proud they are to still have the original Governor's "Mansion" (a big log cabin, in fact), something like 130 years after it's been built. A 130-years-old building doesn't really qualify as very old in Europe, but here in the West, that's the oldest thing they've got! It's starting to change, but until recently, they mostly had the same attitude I read the Chinese have about old things: "we don't need that, it's old, take it down and build new things instead".

PS: I've just understood why I was having difficulties with the quotes and apostrophe in this post: my keyboard was set to Spanish!