London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, my fair lady.
Remember that playground ditty? I do but not the rest. London Bridge was falling down, so it went to … Arizona. Yes, Arizona. I recall that as a kid hearing that London Bridge went to Arizona but never quite believed it. That was until last Tuesday night, when my wife said that we could go see it. We were in Kingman, Arizona, in Mohave County, the same county as Lake Havasu City. Lake Havasu City is where London Bridge now sits. And as it happens, there is a geocache there too.
As my wife and I walked around Lake Havasu City, we thought it reminded us of Florida. There was water and palm trees. The only thing missing were pelicans. We found it hard to believe we were in the Arizona desert.
Before arriving in Lake Havasu City, we started our day in Kingman and found a couple caches there — a puzzle cache I solved weeks ago — and a cool traditional outside the county museum. I left a few trackables in that cache and picked up one.
From Kingman, we hopped on Histroic Route 66 and drove over to Oatman. Along the way, we found a cache that has a “Cars” theme. If you’ve ever seen “Cars,” you know that Lightning McQueen gets stuck in a sleepy little town that got bypassed by the interstate highway. Many of the sites in Radiator Springs are based on sites from across Route 66. So we stopped and found a cache just off the highway that was based on the movie.
Then it was onto Oatman, but first we had to cross Sitgreaves Pass. We found a pullout as the top of the pass, and I got out of the car and found a cache some 400 feet from where we parked. I saw burro scat and burro hoofprints but no actual animals.
Oatman is a town that, like Radiator Springs, was bypassed when the interstate was built. It was a mining town and when the miners abandonded the mines, they also abandonded their burros, so the area has semiwild burros. To make up for loss of traffic from the interstate, Oatman decided to become a tourist stop. Every day at high noon, there is a gunfight in the street.
The day we were there, two guys decide to rob a bank. Guy A talks Guy B into robbing the bank. He robs and then they argue over what to do with the loot. The shoot at each other. One says the other hit him in bum, the other the leg. Then they decide that at the count of 3 they’ll draw and shoot. Guy B starts to count. 1, 2, … 4. Guy A wants to know what happened to 3. Guy B shoots him. It’s all done humorously and they collect money for the Shriners’ Children Hospitals.
After the gunfight, we walked around town. I found two geocaches. One is inside a local business, the other is at the other end of the two- or three-block long town. After I found the second cache, a store clerk sitting outside asked if I found the geocache. I had.
We didn’t spend a lot of time in Oatman. It was off to Lake Havasu City.
What about your caching trips? What have you found that you were unaware was there beforehand? I really like the tiny sliver of Arizona we visited and I’d like to go back and explore more and find more caches.
Geocaching with Capt. TailWagger 