18/08/13 to 24/08/13 - Once leaving Flagstaff our first stop along the old Route 66 was Williams. This was probably the biggest town we would come across, and we had lunch in Cruiser’s Diner, attached to which were a couple of gift shops selling the kind of biker/Elvis/Monroe memorabilia we would be seeing a lot of over the next day or two.
After Williams the next interesting stop was Seligman. With much more scrap value than most places, Seligman was full of cleaned up old motors, petrol stations and other kitsch statues and objects. It had a kind of nostalgic but melancholic charm. There was an old western jail where cowboys and indians used to be kept, and more gift shops than you could imagine necessary even in the 50s. We decided to stop the night here at a motel, which was owned by a friendly Indian chap, who lovingly referred to the Americans as “these idiots”.
Perhaps the most interesting places on Route 66 were the small, less frequented places, which had some real characters. We stopped at a small saloon for a quick hotdog and a drink near Valentine, and the bar was full of old guys in cowboy hats chatting away, probably just to escape the heat of the desert. One of the last stops on the Route was Oatman, an old Wild West town that had been kept that way, and set in between the boulder topped mountains that looked like the sort of place Coyote would hang out. This theory was given more weight when we saw a couple of Roadrunners from time to time on the roads around. Unfortunately we arrived too late to catch the daily gunfight.
At this point we diverted from the Route 66 to detour south to London Bridge… no, that wasn’t a typo, we actually went south to London Bridge, the old one. The second London Bridge was built in 1831 and served as the major crossing between the City of London and Southwark until 1967, when it was sold to an American called Robert P McCulloch. He shipped it brick by brick to the middle of the Arizona desert near Lake Havasu and rebuilt it in 1971. Once it was finished, a canal was dug beneath it, which linked it to the lake. Tourists came to visit the bridge and eventually a new city has sprung up around the bridge, called Lake Havasu City. Living so close to the new (or 3rd) London Bridge back home, we couldn’t miss having a peak at this one and get a piece of it for $1.
It was surreal looking at this old stone bridge, with English, American and Arizona flags all around it, a small Disney-esque English village and clear blue skies, all in air temperatures of 45C. It was the traditionally English surrounded by the typically American as the super-tanned emerged skimming through the arches on their Jet-skis and monster trucks and gigantic campervans crossed over the top of the bridge.
