Lake Havasu City

With the weather worsening in Flagstaff and Albuquerque, we stayed to the south, and parked one night at BlueWater Resort, an Indian casino in Parker, Arizona.  Casinos, like Walmarts, are a source of free overnight camping.  Of course there is no electricity or water, but most RV's are self-contained to one extent or other.  Our GPS description of this casino said that anybody can stay in one parking space for three days, then they have to move to a different space, but can continue to park there.  We learned that that three day rule had never been enforced.  There were a lot of RV's, most of them pretty delapidated-looking.  We talked with one fellow who had been there for a month, and he said that a camper just down the row had been there for two years.  They have to drive about ten miles away to get free water fillups.  Tough life, especially in the summer heat.

The next day we drove to a nice campground in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.  That's the town where you can drive across the London Bridge.  Back in 1967 London deemed its London Bridge unsafe for the high volume of vehicular traffic and dismantled it.  The external masonry was bought by an American, Robert McCulloch, transported to Arizona, and used to build a replica of the bridge as a tourist attraction.  Nancy and I happened to visit Lake Havasu City within a year or two of its reconstruction, in the small and primitive motorhome we owned at the time.  At that point there wasn't much there except for the bridge and a sleepy little village.

What a change!  Lake Havasu City is now a good sized city on a pretty lake, surrounded by mountains.  The whole area is a mecca for RV's.  This is one of the prime sites for "snowbirds" - the folks from cold climates in Canada and the northern US who head south for the winter.  There may be just as many or more in Florida and the Gulf Coast, but you'd think half the RV's and half the mobile homes in America are there, packed in parks along the various lakes in the area, and up in the hills.  Generally this isn't the kind of scenery that Nancy and I like, but the town has the feel of a beach resort, and it's rather attractive.

We had our first In-And-Out burgers since we left California, and we took a ferry across the lake to Havasu Landing, which features a casino and resort on the California side.  We had a cheese plate and Lemon Drop cocktails at a picnic table at our campground while we watched the sunset.  Other than interfacing with our fellow RVers at the campground, there wasn't much to do in Lake Havasu City, except for the excitement of the 49er-Steelers game on TV.

It's beginning to hit us that we're going to be back home, back to the real world, in less than a week.  Bittersweet.  Of course we look forward to seeing friends for the holidays, but we've learned that we really, really like motohome living.  Every day was an adventure.  Some of those adventures were small, some were big, many were wonderful, a few were frightening, but we were never bored.  We find ourselves daydreaming about another - shorter - trip, in the spring of 2012.