I was under the impression that this area of Arizona was a desert. There are Prickly Pear cacti, Saguaro cacti, and Stag horn cacti. There is Grease wood and Mesquite shrubs. We now have slime in our bicycle tires to try to counteract the effect of the Goat head thorns. Yet I swear that they have already enjoyed their whole annual rainfall. Our first night in Lake Havasu City Arizona was a downpour. They have a unique way of handling the runoff here too. All of the streets become tributaries to the Colorado River. Sonja, Judy’s sister came over to the State Park and picked us up and we spent the afternoon at her Park Model Home in a nearby resort. It had been raining steadily all afternoon. When we got ready to return to our motor home the streets were brim full, and it was raining buckets. We detoured around the deepest lakes and crossed a couple of surging streets. When we finally got to the State Park we were faced with a “Dry Wash” that was a raging torrent a couple feet deep and twenty feet wide. We slept on Sonja’s couch. Now that it has dried up a little and we have had some sunshine we were able to ride the tandem around town and do some shopping. They have a very nice bike path that parallels the main highway. Even there we were forced to walk the bicycle through a mud slide that had inundated the bikeway to a depth of a foot or so. We were trying to get to the BLM (Bureau of Land management) to explore cheap alternatives to paying $20 to $40 dollars a night for camping. Now Lake Havasue City is a long town, about ten miles from one city limit to the other. We are near the north end and the BLM is near the south end and 200 feet higher. We made it through the mud and up the hill only to find out that it was Veterans’ Day and the place was closed. Well we did get a nice ride.

This morning started out with a rain shower just before dawn, but it is starting to clear up and it is beginning to look like a nice day is in store for us. There is a R/C model airplane “Fly In” scheduled for this weekend in this very State Park. It is an annual event, and looks like it may be a big event. It is specifically for float planes, and they fly off the lake. I also have a R/C control model float plane, but alas, it is safely stored away in Scappoose. Too bad, I could have gotten help and maybe even learned to fly my own plane. My one flight ended in disaster, and I have been too chicken to try ever since.

The cell phone service is dandy here for our ATT phone. Those with Verizon are mostly without service. Our internet connection is through Verizon, so if you get this today, it will be through the library or an internet café. We will be exploring these services today.

I am going to close today with a quote from the Escapee’s magazine. This is attributed to Peter Sage, “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow – what a ride!'”