Life In Bedrock

In terms of technology, Kingman, Arizona is stuck in the Stone Age. They should call this place Bedrock and elect Fred Flintstone mayor. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops here carried big clubs instead of pistols, and answered nuisance calls for dinosaurs running at large.

We have been in truck stops in far west Texas, and boondocking out in the middle of the desert in Quartzsite, and have had better service on our Verizon cell phones and air card than we get here in Kingman. Getting online at all is a challenge, and being able to navigate to any website or open an e-mail is a crapshoot at best. While we are showing five bars of National Access signal strength, any type of data transfer is nearly impossible.

As I understand it from other RVers who have spent any time here, AT&T service is just as slow. I guess the local good old boys have their little monopoly and aren’t letting anybody else get a toehold in.

To load yesterday’s blog posts, at midnight we had to drive a couple of miles to a McDonald’s restaurant to use their free WiFi signal. Even that was pretty slow, in comparison to our normal service! But we’ll just have to do that for the time we’re here.

To repeat what I asked in yesterday’s blog, please folks, don’t send me jokes and forwards for the next week or so. It takes so long to load them, and they just fill up my inbox.

But, it’s worth the inconvenience to be able to spend a few days with my friend Mike Howard. Mike and I go so far back that I almost think Fred Flintstone may have been one of our playmates back in the day. Whenever I go to visit somebody that I have known forever, but don’t see on a daily basis, it always amazes me how old they have gotten. How can that be? I’m still only in my early 20s in my own mind. In fact, who is that old fart that keeps showing up in my mirror every morning when I brush my teeth? What’s that geezer doing there?

I have received a lot of e-mail and comments from folks about yesterday’s blog, in which I wrote about the TA truck stop here in Kingman dinging my debit card for $500 as a “security fee” when we purchased fuel on our way into town. I’ve heard from several other RVers who have experienced similar problems at different truck stops across the country.

Apparently, the folks at TA monitor such things, because I got an e-mail from a lady in their corporate office saying that a gentleman would be calling me to “correct this situation for you.” However, as of right now, that was the last I’ve heard. There was no follow-up phone call, and the money has not been put back into my bank account. The “situation” remains “uncorrected.”

Of course, maybe they’re chipping out a reply to me on a stone tablet, and that’s what is taking so long. Such is life in Bedrock.

Yabba-Dabba-Doo! 

 Thought For The Day – You can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry. – Paul Theroux