LAKE HAVASU CITY

We left Yuma shortly after 10 a.m. on Friday, April 1 and it was good to get out on the road again.  We had a 3 hour drive northwards on highway 95 through Quartzite, Parker and along the eastern shore of the Colorado River to Lake Havasu City.  Lake Havasu (the name is derived from the Chemehuevi meaning "Land of the Blue Green Water") is a large reservoir behind Parker Dam on the Colorado River, on the border between California and Arizona.  We stopped here for 3 nights to enjoy the warm temperatures (up to 98 F/37 C yesterday) and check out the area for future considerations.

Today, we went to see the original London Bridge that was shipped from England stone-by-stone and reconstructed in Lake Havasu City. When the bridge, built in the 1830s, began to sink into the Thames River in the 1960s, it was replaced by a more modern concrete bridge.  England put the stones up for sale in 1967 and a man named Robert P. McCulloch Sr. purchased the bridge on April 17, 1968, at a cost of $2,460,000.  The 10,246 blocks were shipped to Arizona and reassembled over a lagoon at the edge of Lake Havasu at a cost of $3,000,000. The “new” London Bridge opened in 1971.

Tomorrow, we plan to drive north to Las Vegas for a one night stay and then start the steady journey towards home.  It will be a shock to the system to go from daytime temperatures in the high 30s C to highs of 10 or 12 C and dropping to freezing at night.  Let’s just hope we don’t have to deal with snow along the way.