Seeking An Extraordinary Life - A Travel Journal

In the morning Deidre leaves early for her appointment, so I laze around the motel, blog a little, and make a damn good steak sandwich out of leftovers from Sizzler (God bless the USA and enthusiastic doggie box policies). At around lunchtime I stroll out to a Starbucks a block down, and linger over a frappaccino until Deidre arrives. We return to the restaurant by the motel for fantastic Mexican food - I have the tamales, which are firm and meaty in a wonderfully tangy sauce, even the simple rice and beans are superlative. Then it's time to head for home.

The day is clear and beautiful, with only odd clouds scudding across the wide blue sky, although even this far south the wind is pretty gold. This time, for some reason best known to itself, the in-car GPS takes us on a different route across a lot of farmlands and sideroads. We roll by huge fields of impossible green in the middle of the arid yellow wastelands...Monsanto's carefully irrigated growing spaces, which spit in the eye of any kind of natural cycle but are nonetheless stunningly beautiful in their isolation.

We pass through the usual scrub and cactus, and then into cotton fields - acres of brown, dead-looking sticks festooned with balls of pure white cotton. We pull over at a side-road and I jump out to collect a little bundle of the stuff. It's bizarre that this is the product of a plant, this perfect, soft, white fibre. Further on we see a hawk sweeping and dipping over the fields, scanning for small squeaky things. We roll down the windows and let the breeze play through the car - the wind is cold but so pure and fresh out here.

After dark and well on our way home we pass through Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a town which Deidre knows very well as her friend Brian (who I met in San Francisco) used to live here. It's a nice little town with a bit of character and one major claim to fame - London Bridge.

Between 1962 and 1968 the original London Bridge over the Thames, which was beginning to suffer under its weight of traffic, was sold to an American oil tycoon, Robert McCulloch, who was the founder of Lake Havasu City. He had it shipped stone-by-stone and rebuilt here, where it receives a more moderate amount of use and forms the town's most famous tourist attraction, bringing in considerable tourist money. It links the two sides of the town, which crosses the border into California

We pull into the parking lot at one end of the bridge and look out along the elegant spotlit span with its original black iron lamps, utterly incongruous amid the strip malls and Best Westerns of a small American town. There's a little resort attached to the bridge, with souvenir shops, cafes, and novelty shops, and right now the whole thing is cocooned in Christmas lights, the whole elaborate building and the trees in front of it too. It's a multicoloured gingerbread house of lights.

We wander down through the little garden to the base of the bridge, experiment with the amazing acoustics under the huge arch then walk across the bridge itself to the California side and back, looking down at the glowing resort complex from high above and exchanging silly noises with the flotillas of ducks which drift back and forth below.