After the unspeakable damage Dusty Dave did to Puffy The Pillow during our ATV adventure it was time for a couple of groin- friendly (but still 65th birthday worthy) events. To that end we made the relatively long drive to Lake Havasu to visit London Bridge (without telling Dave). London Bridge?? In Arizona??

In 1896 the bridge was the busiest point in London, England, and one of its most congested; 8,000 pedestrians (including Dusty Dave?) and 900 vehicles crossed every hour. Surveys showed that the bridge was sinking about 2.5 cm every 8 years. The bridge would have to be removed and replaced. In 1968, the bridge was sold to an American, Missourian entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil, for US$2,460,000. The claim that McCulloch believed mistakenly that he was buying the more impressive Tower Bridge was denied but never quite went away. The bridge was taken apart, meticulously numbered, and then shipped overseas through the Panama Canal to California and trucked from Long Beach to Arizona. The reconstruction of London Bridge spans the Bridgewater Channel canal that leads from the uptown area of Lake Havasu City and follows McCulloch Boulevard onto an island in the lake.

"London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady."

Back in his soccer hooligan days (he was likely known as Dangerous Dave B in his pre-arthritis teenage years), I can only imagine that he and his equally fanatical Queens Park Rangers childhood friend, Steve M, used to torment various London neighbourhoods, pushing Chelsea fans off the sidewalk and spray painting the QPR fight song on numerous historic monuments:

"Two, four, six, eight
How often do we score and celebrate
Almost never, but we keep trying
Even though, our title hopes are dying"

It's not a far stretch to envision these two hooligans carving their initials somewhere along the length of this iconic bridge before it was moved to its new home in the middle of the Arizona desert so we were hoping that Dusty Dave would remember and find the scene of the crime.

We were able to get him to the middle of the bridge, walking past the London Bridge Pharmacy, the London Bridge Motel, the London Bridge Dog Grooming Center... before this eagle-eyed former police investigator realized he was standing on a stone reminder of his childhood. It wasn't quite the sobbing, emotionally draining reunion we were expecting to see (unless you count an indifferent shoulder shrug as emotional??), but his eyes did tear up briefly. To be fair, with his recent groin tragedy, we'd seen him tear up quite a bit recently

After we wrapped up our visit to Lake Havasu, we headed north to a town named Oatman. I thought it would be a continuation of the soccer hooligan theme, but when they say it's a town full of donkeys, they are referring to the four-legged kind. Wild burros freely roam the town and can be hand-fed hay cubes otherwise known as "burro chow," readily available in practically every store in town. The donkeys are descended from pack animals turned loose by early prospectors, and are protected by the US Department of the Interior. Apparently donkeys don't like cold winds any more than we do so there was only one lonely representative when we were in Oatman and, as the centre of attention, wouldn’t accept burro chow from us as he searched for the more delectable carrots.

Given the current donkey shortage, the highlight of Oatman was another in a long list of love declarations that DH and I (mainly 'I') having been leaving behind as we travel the world. Signed dollar bills are stapled all over the walls and ceilings of the Oatman Hotel Bar so DH added her sweet nothings to a bill and climbed on to my shoulders so she could staple it high and well out of range of any scofflaws (not trusting me as much as she should she head-locked my face and crouched so low that our dollar bill ended up being stapled right at scofflaw eye level). The Health Dept mandates that all of the dollar bills be removed periodically in order to control viruses so it would likely come down sooner or later anyway.