Lake Havasu City – Twosna Travels

Here’s a fun bit of trivia for you. When you think of the London Bridge, what do you think of?

Is it this?

No, that’s Tower Bridge, in London, England.

Is it the bridge that you see to the left of this picture?

Wrong again! No, that’s Westminster Bridge, also in London.

London Bridge is in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Like the two bridges above, it once spanned the River Thames in London, England.

In its original home, London Bridge was in bad shape. The city determined to sell it, and in 1968 an entrepreneur and developer named Robert P. McCulloch from Missouri placed the winning bid of $2.4 million dollars for reconstruction in Arizona. He had already built the planned community of Lake Havasu City in 1964, but this would really put it on the map.

He didn’t purchase the insides of the bridge, though. This bridge is reinforced concrete. He only purchased the exterior granite blocks of the original structure. It was completed in 1971.

The city of London, England rebuilt their London Bridge in the 1970’s, but it is built for function and not decoration. Hundreds of thousands of cars drive over that bridge over the Thames daily.

Robert Mccullough also built “English Village” next to the bridge, with British-themed shops and facades made to look like old London. Those are mostly gone now, replaced with shopping, dining, and entertainment venues. But we still got a little taste of the English Village as we walked in for a look. The bridge is behind it.

This London Bridge was not London’s first. The Visitor Center has a nice video which discusses the older London Bridges which go back in time to the 1200’s. In those days, London Bridge had multi-level houses, shops and pubs on it. The current bridge was built in 1729.

When tearing down the bridge in London, 10,276 pieces were numbered for shipment to Arizona. The latter part of the video details the preparation of the site for the bridge, and the reconstruction in putting those numbered pieces back together in Lake Havasu City.

Who besides Robert McCullough would think about putting a bridge in the desert? This bridge did go over nothing but desert land, so he built Bridgewater Channel to divert water from Lake Havasu.

*Looking down at the Channel from London Bridge*

There are paths along both sides of the channel which lead to Lake Havasu. On an early morning it was an enjoyable place for a walk.

*The actual walking path is to the left of this picture*

A fun thing about Lake Havasu is that there are 28 lighthouses all around the lake. They are working small replicas of lighthouses around the United States. A group of concerned citizens formed the Lake Havasu Lighthouse Club to improve night-time navigation for boaters on the lake. Besides being decorative, they serve an important function with their lights.

At the end of the canal path, we found our first one.

This is Currituck Beach Lighthouse. The original is on the Outer Banks in Corolla, North Carolina. This lighthouse is one eighth the size of that one, which stands at 168 feet.

The lighthouses on the east, or Arizona side, are replicas of East Coast lighthouses. The ones on the west side of the lake in California are replicas of West Coast lighthouses.

When the canal was built under the London Bridge, an island was created on what was formerly a peninsula. We had heard there is a bike trail around the island, so we rode it on one of our days here.

I was excited to see this lighthouse on the far west side of the island. The lighthouses on the island are Great Lakes lighthouses and this one is Split Rock. The beautiful original overlooks Lake Superior in Two Harbors, Minnesota, and it is one we have visited often.

From this viewpoint, we could see over to California.

There are RV parks on the island and I would have liked to have stayed at one of them, but they come with long waiting lists. We would have had to put our names on a list now in order to hope for someone to call us for a stay next year, or maybe the following year. We circled around one of the parks and down along to the beach to one of its corners to find this gem.

It is so close to the mainland here that I guess they figured they’d put an East Coast lighthouse in this spot. This is West Quoddy Lighthouse in Maine. I liked this one because it came with the little lightkeeper’s cabin. It’s the first lighthouse the club built.

You could make an expedition to find all the lighthouses. There are boat excursions on the lake designed to see most, or all of them. I thought it was fun just to find them at random.

Lake Havasu has beautiful sunsets.

Here’s something fun. These signs were all over this part of Arizona. We thought they were pretty humorous, although probably they weren’t meant to be. Whenever Cal had a momentary confusion about which way to go, I’d say “Just DRIVE!” and we would have a good chuckle all over again.

If you think this might be a nice place to visit, just know that it is very busy. We did both the channel stroll and the bike ride in the morning, and the large parking lot was almost empty. By the time we returned, it was full and traffic was clogged. This is headquarters for every outdoor and water activity you could think of. We wish there would have been easier access to the bridge to get up and around the traffic for bikes. While I’m assembling my dream list, a bike trail along the road to our RV park would also have been nice, because it goes right past a nature preserve on one side and dunes on the other. But maybe they just need to finish the bike trail on the island first, with paved bike access to the lighthouses.

Next time – burros!

The highways that we have traveled on in southern California have been endlessly interesting to me. I’ve ridden on a lot of America’s roads in my life, but the state was mostly a mystery before this winter. I often toss my stitching or a book in the truck on travel day, but not here. I’m normally not able to get pictures since we are usually zipping down the highway.

To me, just seeing America’s roadways is a big part of the RV life.

I was so eager to dive into the San Diego blogs that I didn’t mention the incredible landscape that we had had on I-8 going from Yuma to San Diego. We started out traveling at sea level through windy sand dunes, with sand visibly swirling in the air. Later, we went through mountains of rocks.

Toward the end, there was a larger mountain to cross over, which we summitted at 4,100 feet in a snow squall. Cal said he felt as if he’d driven through four seasons all in one day.

I wrote in my last blog about our entrance to the Coachella Valley, which was short but no less dramatic. From Desert Hot Springs, we continued on I-10 through the valley floor to its eastern end near Desert Center. And I really don’t know if Desert Center is a town, because I never saw it.

We had an adjustment to make with our RV reservation in Lake Havasu City and, as a consequence, I’d needed to find us a park for one night before our arrival there. I found one on Lake Tamarisk, two miles north of the highway. It lay in the middle of the desert.

This place contained a mix of mostly permanent trailers but also some RV’s. There are 150 sites at this resort, and if you buy into it, you therefore own 1/150th of the entire park. It’s governed by a park committee, all owners. They maintain a handful of sites for us folks passing through.

*A new and pretty cactus garden built by the women of the park*

There was a trail around the lake, which was smaller than I thought it would be, but beautiful nonetheless with ducks and a crane, and an occasional fish jumping.

*Blue waters out in the desert. Is this a mirage?*

A trail also wound in and around the park. It was not fancy, but had very homey feeling not unlike Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. On our walk, we passed by one of the trailers, and the owners were out having a late afternoon beer and popcorn on their patio. We’d seen them earlier in the day, so they invited us over. Gene and Dawn are from Oregon and, visiting from next door, Ken and his adult daughter are from Vancouver, Canada. We had a lovely visit and they told us the park is mostly owned by 50% golfers and 50% ATV owners. The whole desert is right out there to be hiked or ridden in. But, the nearest grocery store is fifty miles away. Most folks return to homes up North during the summer.

The whole experience was so far “out there” that we wondered if we’d stumbled into some sort of desert mirage. Was this Shangri-La? Being neither golfers nor ATV drivers, would we enjoy staying here for a week or two? For the entire winter? Would we get bored? We weren’t sure, but these were all things to ponder as we drove away the next morning.

From I-10, we had two choices in our route north to Lake Havasu City: state route 95 in California, or the same-numbered road in Arizona. We opted for the California route, because I could see on the map that the Colorado River went right alongside it after some miles. The scenery was stunning. Cal found a turnoff where we could have one of our lawn chair picnics.

Across the river and once again heading north, but this time on Arizona Route 95, there were more rocky hills to see. This is where I took the picture at the top of the blog. We landed at Lake Havasu City to find our next RV park.

It was a very small park for very large RV’s, mostly those big Class A “diesel pushers”. Our 34-foot 5th wheel was at the lowest limit for size. The park road was one small oval inside a cinder block wall, and one thing I had neglected to note while reserving: absolutely no amenities, which meant no laundry. We 5th wheels were allotted just a handful of sites together, humbly grateful just to be allowed to the party. There was not a shred of anything green, but we had a huge paved site with plenty of room, along with an extra spot for our ATV, if we’d had one. The on-line pictures had made it look a lot greener. Open RV sites are hard to come by in this town.

There was some fine entertainment to be had at this park, though. The weather was so nice that we were eating dinner out at our picnic table. Every evening around 5:30 or 6:00 PM, we’d start to see many birds flying in our direction from far in the distance. More would arrive, and, after much circling, they would fly over our heads to the top of a tree on the other side of the fence. We would marvel at their wing spans as they soared over us. They were turkey buzzards! By the end of the evening, there was much jockeying for the best perches, and invariably one or two would get knocked off, but finally they would all settle down. And in the morning, they opened their wings to stretch for awhile, and they’d all be off again.

*It may not look like it, but this tree is full of turkey buzzards doing their morning wing stretches*. *We could figure no reason why they were attracted to this particular tree.*

Later, we rode our bikes over to another RV park to visit a couple that we’d met in Desert Hot Springs. Their sites were so close that there was no room side to side. We had to visit in front of their RV, in the park road. And the RV park was sitting on the busy state route. Suddenly our spot looked great, with all of our space and those turkey buzzards to provide our evening entertainment.

So, we dipped our toes back into Arizona for a six night stay. This is a boating, ATVing, and weekend partying area. That’s why it’s very hard to get a spot in any RV park here, even during the week. What is there to see in Lake Havasu City? That will be the subject of my next post, but here’s a little bit of a sneak preview: