Located on a street where Gold Rushers used to tread, Lutes isn’t a gambling house at all. Lutes Casino is a legendary place in Yuma’s historic district. We were tempted to nudge those swans to the side and collapse for the evening, but we had a date with a Lutes Especial, so off to Main Street we went. I could go into the other room and wouldn’t disturb Jim with my insanely early scratchings and peckings.

That was adorable, but what was even better was the second bedroom with a lighted vanity, which meant that when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. We quickly checked into the Coronado Motor Hotel, the first “modern-style” motel in Arizona, and the first thing we saw when we entered our room was the kissing swans made out of towels on the bed. I reached out, and before I knew it we were spending two nights in Yuma with a packed itinerary. That quickly became a “Heck yea!” after I checked the Yuma Visitors Bureau’s website and social media accounts and saw how much civic pride existed. After I entered Cottonwood, Arizona, and Bombay Beach, California, the route shifted through Yuma and I thought “why not?” That’s cool, but what was invaluable for planning this trip was that I could add destinations and see how it would change our journey. If you enter the type of car you’ll be driving it’ll estimate how much gas will cost, too. You add your starting point and your destination and it plots them on a map, showing you the route and how much time it will take. Roadtrippers is an online planning tool for – you guessed it – road trips. This is part of our EPIC Southwest USA road trip from the Chicago-area to San Diego and back! I hadn’t even seen the movie, either the original or the remake, so the only thing I really knew was that there was a place called Yuma and there were outlaws and a train. Besides the movie “3:10 to Yuma,” I knew nothing about the border city in southwestern Arizona.

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