We spent a few days in Lake Havasu State Park. A nice place just a short walk up the road from town, it’s an easy place to go for a walk to dinner, grab some groceries, or get parts from Napa. The kids rode bikes, found places to disappear to, surprised a coyote, and just generally enjoyed the place.

We’d seen signs all over pointing to London Bridge, but didn’t give it any thought until we actually walked down there. Turns out it’s not just a cheeky name, it actually is London Bridge. This thing spanned the Thames beginning in the 1830s, and thanks to some real estate developer in the desert back in the 1960s it now crosses a canal along the Colorado River.

We rented a boat to rip around the river on. Unfortunately, it has been cold and windy for a while now, and our day on the boat was no different. We bundled up with whatever we had (we don’t have much in the way of warm clothes) and headed out. It was a fun day out, but we really have little use for water that you can’t jump into.

Somehow I managed to hit a rock with the propeller. Saw the buoy, but thought it was just another no wake warning. I slowed down before it, then could see it said rock, and then clank. We were fifty feet away, at least, but still were able to rack up a hundred dollar prop repair bill with that move. The rental people had made a big show of taking pictures of the brand new prop before I left. I gather this happens routinely.

All the ducks in the area are accustomed to being fed. We actually had them flying alongside the boat at 20 miles an hour while looking at us expectantly.

Fun day out, even if this wasn’t our usual boat attire.

From Lake Havasu we headed north. A friend had mentioned Oatman, so we swung over that way.

Lots of curves and rough roads sent a good portion of what was on the shelves down onto the floor.

Right about here I was thinking that I really hoped the road was about to take a sharp left instead of continuing straight up.

It didn’t. For the most part it just kept climbing. But the bus chugged along just fine. We had seen online that there were “Bed Races” in Oatman that day, but we hadn’t expected that to draw much of a crowd. But as we approached town we noticed people walking up the hill and cars were suddenly lining the shoulders of the very narrow road. Oh boy.

As we pulled into town some angry lady screamed out, “You can’t drive that thing up here!” It’s funny because Ali had read some story about someone’s recent visit to Oatman that talked about how horrible the residents had been to her, including screaming at her for having her dog with her as she walked through town. We’d laughed at the story, but here we were getting yelled at by what was probably the same person. Apparently, someone has to keep order in Oatman.

Fortunately, there was a friendly guy directing traffic who pointed us up a little side road where we could find parking.

It took a pretty wild and bouncy ride in the lowest gear possible to get up to this empty spot overlooking town, but we made it. After shoving wheel chocks and boulders under every tire, we went down to watch the races.

Oatman was a fun little stop, but because the town was so busy we couldn’t get a table to have lunch, and we never have any use for knick-knack shops, so we didn’t linger long.