I have seen the London Bridge in person, but I have never been to London. How, you ask? A little more than a year ago I would have asked the same question, but that was before I found out that in 1968 some lunatic (visionary?) purchased the 930 foot bridge—originally built in the 1830s over the river Thames—and shipped it to the Arizona side of Lake Havasu (the other side being California), hoping that it would draw real estate investment to the area, since he owned the land where it would be (re)erected.
Naturally, the bridge was rebuilt on a peninsula, and only afterwards was a canal dug out from under it so that it could actually once again serve its function as a bridge. And that’s the story of how Lake Havasu City was founded, from a bridge so curiously, anachronistically absurd that a town sprung up around it.
Walking along the canal here reminds me a little bit of the San Antonio Riverwalk, with shops and bars and all kinds of the best kinds of chaos typically happening, though I’m here during a tourism lull. But the signs of oddball attractions are evident—an outdoor ice-skating rink (it’s 65 degrees today), a tiki-hut boat (like those damnable pedal pubs, but on the water and with an outboard motor, so probably even more damnable), a ferry ride down the canal and across the lake to a casino in California (where should you lose everything you may mercifully drown yourself on the ride back), and an imitative ye olde England village. I grabbed a seat at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the canal and did like ye olde English stereotype, ordering fish n’ chips from a waitress who complained that it was cold out.
I found out about the bridge last year after reading about the area while staying about 100 miles north of here at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and while I didn’t make it here then, I vowed to come back. But before I got here I did The Drive…
Which was, at times, brutal. Readying a camper and leaving in the middle of winter is, as I’ve said, incongruent and not ideal, but to escape winter one must first physically leave it. Injuries were incurred while I was prepping my camper; at 10 degrees while twiddling with stubborn battery terminal cables with bare hands I think I suffered my first frostbite: one of my fingertips feels like it’s been burned, though lingering pain must be a positive sign that my body is not yet ready to give up the digit.
Once readied, my trip was delayed a day because of the snowstorm that blew through much of my planned route through Kansas, far western Oklahoma, and into New Mexico. Because the camper isn’t four-season (note to self: earn more money and buy four-season camper), I’d hoped to kill a huge chunk of miles on day one and get into warmer weather, but after 650 miles I was done, ending in Norton, Kansas, where the temp was -1. I pulled into a city park dedicated to Norton’s veterans and called it a night, but my little propane heater—running nonstop—never could get the camper above 45 degrees. I should have gotten a hotel somewhere, but as they say, buy the ticket, take the ride. Fortunately I’d planned on that possibility and had about 10 blankets and wore a stocking cap where my bald head would otherwise have peeked out like a scared turtle’s on my pillow.
In the morning I could see my breath and all the camper windows had a thick coating of frost on the inside. With nothing to do but move, I hit the road and let it melt while I warmed up in the cab of the truck. Soon I was passing through southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle (nicknamed “No man’s land”), past the cleverly compounded Texhoma, then through that little pop-up tabletop bump-out in northwest Texas and into New Mexico, crossing four states all within the span of about 50 miles. I’m not sure if that area has a name, but I think Kantexihoma might work, or maybe Shitsville would be more apt. If you did a tight little circle in this area, you could also cross into Colorado and hit five states in about an hour (The only other place I think you can pass through so many states in so little distance is where Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri meet, aka MissKenTennesasinois.
In short order, truck, trailer, and I met up with I-40 and while heading toward Albuquerque, snow began falling and the roads were glazed like the worst kind of donut. Traffic suddenly slowed to a near standstill as a semi-truck trailer overturned and separated from the cab, which was smashed to hell in the ditch so badly I don’t see how the driver could have survived.
Cars were bumper-to-bumper now for miles, most of us crawling along at walking speed with our hazards on, a sad parade of the fortunate and the less fortunate. As the miles dragged, dozens of other vehicles flipped over, crashing into medians and slipping off shoulders. I managed 20 mph for 40 miles or so and finally with 10 miles to go until Albuquerque the snow suddenly cleared and the roads were dry and I was back up to 70 with no physical damage done, but I thought about those drivers, especially the semi-truck driver, and hope he or she survived as I pulled into Sky City Casino/hotel/RV park (it had electricity, so I could run both my electric backup heater and propane) and called it a night after another 675 miles in the bag.
Early in the morning Willie Nelson’s classic beckoned and again on the road the distinctive desert scenery of the southwest began to show a hundred miles or so west of Albuquerque, with its rocky soil and sporadic clumps of creosote bushes starving for water. But soon the land begins to rise and the hills give way to some of America’s more than 200 mountain ranges that aren’t the Rockies.
Near Grants, New Mexico, you start to see black rocks that look like construction debris from a project gone wrong as I-40 passes through the north end of the El Malpais lava fields, one of the most recent lava flows in U.S. history. As you eat up the miles, Mt. Taylor in the distance grows and grows, all 11,300 feet of it—the highest point of the San Mateo Mountains. If you have the time, you can stop and explore the many lava tubes of El Malpais, but I’m still searching for warmer weather where the daylight burns more than time.
The last thing to note as I cross into Arizona is that New Mexico’s license plates read “Land of Enchantment,” but within the last decade, feeling the enchantment perhaps dwindling, the state added slogan number 2: “Chile Capital of the World.” Which is, of course, demonstrably false (it’s China: Mexico is a distant second, New Mexico is not an honorable mention), but Wisconsin (see caveat) has more lakes than Minnesota, and that didn’t stop us from plating “Land of 10,000 Lakes.”
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