Arizona - Lake Havasu City and Yuma

Monday, Oct. 13th - Tuesday, Nov. 25th

From St. George, Utah we drove to Lake Havasu City and stayed for a week, with our new membership, at one of the Colorado Adventures campgrounds.

One of our days here we rode our bikes 16 miles round trip to downtown and across the London Bridge and around the little island where there is a nice bike path.  Lake Havasu is about 50 miles long backed up from the dam at Parker.  The old London Bridge was purchased and moved here in 1971 by the fellow trying to sell lots and get a new city going here.  It was a gimmick to create some interest and publicity and I guess it worked.  They dredged this channel which left an island and a place to put the bridge, so it was needed to get to the island where there are now resort condos and an RV park.

From Havasu we went to Yuma and have been here for about five weeks.  We haven't done a whole lot here besides swimming, hot tubbing, hiking, reading and relaxing.  We have seen quite a few movies, since the senior price is only $5.00.  We saw The Equalizer with Denzel Washington while we were in Havasu, pretty good action film.  We also saw Interstellar (so so), John Wick (don't bother), Best of Me (chick flick, okay), Beyond the Lights (chick flick, okay), Gone Girl (sort of a fatal attraction, suspense, pretty good), Fury with Brad Pitt (pretty good), Nightcrawler (pretty good).  My favorite so far is The Judge with Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr.

We went out for John's favorite, all you can eat BBQ ribs, for the fourth Saturday in a row and then headed to the annual balloon lighting festival, but we were a little late for any good pictures.

They were just finishing up and starting to deflate them as we arrived.

So we got to watch as they packed them up.  There was quite a group of workers here rolling the balloon all together and tying it up with straps at intervals.

These guys didn't tie their's up at all.  They just had a big heavy duty canvas bag and kept lifting it up and folding it down into the bag and stuffing it in.  When they were done, it looked like a big hay bale and a guy started rolling it over to the trailer, where two guys grabbed it by the handles and lifted it into the trailer.  The baskets looked like they might possibly hold four people.

  When we were in Australia, we went on a sunrise hot air balloon ride and we had about 20 people in our basket.  We were surrounded by other balloons as the sun came up.  It was so beautiful!  We could see kangaroos down below us and they looked like a bunch of little mice hopping around. I highly recommend taking a balloon ride sometime, somewhere if you get the chance.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot, when we getting ready to take off, the guys in charge tied our balloon to a Toyota pickup, so it wouldn't float away.  When we landed in a field they looked around to see what they could anchor it to and tied it to John.  Thank goodness for overly large Americans!  Which reminds me, the first time we tried to book a balloon ride we were in New Zealand, and the guy on the phone apologized, but said he had to ask, since he recognized our American accent, if we had anyone overly large in our party.  When asked how he defined overly large and he said over 200 pounds.  We didn't get to go on that particular trip, as the night before we ended up stranded on top of a mountain in Queenstown where we had taken a chair lift up.  Strong winds came up and they shut down the lift and we were there until about 10:00 PM.  We had to cancel, because there was no way we could get back to our room in time to get up by 4:00 AM and get to the balloon ride before sunrise.  John also went bungee jumping over a river while we were in New Zealand and got a good soaking.   A bit of a math error in how far he was supposed to fall.  Thank goodness it was over water!

Anyway, Tuesday we put the RV in storage and headed over to central California to spend Thanksgiving with John's sister for a week and another week at Pismo Beach on the coast in a small cabin right near the beach.  I like the desert, but I also like the beach, especially the ones in Florida and Texas where it is really warm and it's fun to go swimming and/or wading in the ocean.

Happy Turkey Day Everybody!

Tarra