Day 80 - London Bridge in Lake Havasu City & Route 66, CA

When we went to dinner last night in Needles, we noticed the Route 66 theme throughout the town. After a quick check of the paper map, we realised that Historic Route 66 ran alongside the interstate for most of the journey between Needles and Flagstaff. We decided to try to drive as much of Route 66 as we could.

It was a far more interesting road than the interstate and compared to Route 66 in Oklahoma, there seemed to be a higher concentration of weird, wonderful and cool themed attractions.

Our route took us over the border back into Arizona where we stopped off to see London Bridge in Lake Havasu City.

We'd both heard the story about the American man that bought London Bridge for his city thinking it was Tower Bridge so when we went into the visitors center and were asked if we knew the history, we replied very diplomatically that we'd 'heard one version of the story'. We were then sent to watch a short film that gave the other side of the story.

London Bridge was sinking into the Thames, the sinking was so bad, the east side was 4 inches lower than the west side plus it wasn't designed for all the modern road vehicles that were now on the road. So it was agreed to be replaced. 

In 1967, the old London Bridge went up for sale and the Lake Havasu City founder, Robert P. McCulloch placed the winning bid of $2,460,000. Yes, we actually sold a sinking bridge for several million!

Each block of the bridge was numbered and then shipped via the Panama Canal to California where it was trucked to Arizona. 

The bridge was reconstructed and opened in 1971 and hopefully it has been built on top of some sort of structure that is going to stop it from sinking again! 

The visitors center is located in the British themed 'The Shoppes at the London Bridge', some of the items coming from the UK including the metal gates (from Dudley Manor) and the fountains and lions. It was a little odd being in this English themed tourist attraction, there are things you recognise but they're not quite right. Maybe this is how the Chinese feel when they visit Chinatown in London. At least it looks like we managed to sell some of the pigeons in London along with the bridge or maybe they were a free add on as part of the deal!

We continued along Route 66 to Kingman where we stopped for a break. We actually stopped because Lee saw a big train and being a big kid really, he wanted to go onto the train. It turned out to be a really cool little roadside attraction where you could learn about the history of the train but more importantly, climb on it and be a driver or an engineer.

Like many of the towns we passed through on this road, Kingman had embraced the 66 theme making it a really interesting town to drive through.

Before leaving Kingman, we stopped off for one of our favourite treats in America, a lemon (and for Lee a lime) slush from Sonic Drive In. No doubt these are full of sugar but they contain a real lemon and lime (making you think they're good for you) and they're really refreshing in the hot weather. The drive in nature is a little odd. You drive up to screen, press a button, speak to someone to order (it's not automated) and then pay using the screen (this bit is automated). You then wait for someone to bring your order to your car where you can either drive away with it or eat it in your car parked in the Sonic. To us, it felt like a good concept which just hasn't been completed. Why not automate the whole process, ordering food using a screen is already in places like McDonald's and with all this automation, why does someone need to come out to the car with the food, surely there must be robots or little trains that can do this for you? Clearly I need to go to Sonic and help them with their automation, its just not there yet.

Back on the 66, we went through a couple more small towns all with interesting and strange 66 themed sights before hitting the end of the road (literally) so we jumped onto the Interstate for the final stretch into Flagstaff.