Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

May 7, 2005

Lake Havasu City

I got to Lake Havasu City on the 5th. I was tired when I set out and tired when I arrived, but I took it steady and didn’t make any dangerous moves AFAIK. The scenery was more of the same: lots of saguaro cactus (*), hills, intriguing rock formations, until I got to 95 north, when the road followed a canyon and was quite spectacular.

Route followers: 60 west to 72 to 95 north.

Lake Havasu is a reservoir, and sparkles blue in the sunshine. When I got to Joan and Paul’s house, they had a fantastic view of the mountains and the lake. (*) I freely admit to not bothering much with being online (I wasn’t able to hook my laptop up to a line, as there was no local dialup on my system, and I had fast browser-based stuff that I could use; just couldn’t use my outbound email). So I spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of the universe, and reading, and relaxing.

Had a little epiphany: “Time to come home”. I was thinking of making the trip last to 42 days, but nope. Time to come home.

I had never met Joan and Paul in real life before. Their son, Michael, was one of my first ever friends in California, a lovely guy, Virago rider like me, and that’s how we met. Michael injured his back at work, and his surgeries got progressively worse, and then he died very suddenly and unexpectedly three years ago. I still miss him - a lot. Anyway, I emailed back and forth with his parents, and sent them a postcard because I’d lost their latest email, and they invited me over.

I’m glad I went, because they are lovely people and I had a wonderful time, if a little bittersweet and sad at times.

Joan took me down to see the London Bridge (*) and to play tourist in the English village (*). Then we went and browsed round the kitschy little gift shops. (**) And then we went over the London Bridge and I got views of the lake. (*)

I decided to stay two nights because Don was not able to set out when he thought, and I needed to relax: I was tired! It did me a lot of good. When I got up on Friday I had a message saying that Don made it to Mojave at some obscene time in the morning; so I knew it was time to move on.