Las Vegas to Lake Havasu City

Monday, November 11, 2019
Lake Havasu City, Arizona, United States
There are many people for whom Las Vegas is the ultimate travel destination with its casinos and entertainment. To me it honestly holds very little appeal. I spent a few days in the area about a decade ago, walked the strip, wandered through some of the most famous casino hotels, pigged out at a champagne brunch buffet at Bellagio where I also watched the fountains show, and left quite unimpressed. In 2009 Las Vegas had changed immensely from my previous time there for a day or two with two friends in 1993. The city is now just recovering from the Great Recession of 2008 and has changed relatively little over the last decade with almost no major new casino hotels.
So then why stop in Las Vegas?  The only reason was to visit some friends who live in the area.  I met Scott in early 2014 on a tour in India.  I recall him asking me then (when I was still based in Denver) if I’d visit him in Vegas. “Of course, but it might take a while!” And I did mean that I would look him up. I’ve kept up over the years with him and his wife Herma on Facebook.   When I let them know I’d be in Las Vegas, Scott suggested meeting out for beers at the Triple 7 Brewery in Main Street Station Casino in downtown Las Vegas.
My two previous times in Las Vegas I went to “The Strip”, the linear road that runs south from downtown along which most of the major casinos are located.  There are other significant casino hotels elsewhere around the Las Vegas metro area, but the other concentration is in the downtown area.  I heard Downtown Vegas had become seedy at one point and fallen on hard times in favor of the glitzier and more glamorous strip but that it has been experiencing a renaissance since the mid to late-1990s. And I’ve read numerous times about “The Fremont Street Experience”, which seemed to me to be some kind of major entertainment complex.  You never really know what to expect, though, based on what you read in National Geographic Traveler and the like.
I expected we’d meet for beers and maybe dinner, but Scott had a whole evening out on the town planned for us, cut short only by the fact that Herma had to got to work in the morning, which happened to be Veterans Day Monday.  The next stop on Scott’s tour was the Speakeasy in the basement of the nearby “Mob Museum”, officially the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, a Vegas attraction that might be actually be informative instead of simply entertaining. After a strong beer there and listening to some jazz, Scott’s tour of downtown Vegas really began, in and out of several casinos where who knew the drink specials to be good, and ducked into one to get our free pictures taken together. Then on to the Fremont Street Experience, which I now understand better. It’s a pedestrian mall where several blocks of Fremont Street that used to be known as “Glitter Gulch” have been covered and turned into a big public commercial and entertainment complex. It’s a public space that attracts an amazing array of street performers of all sorts, the wild and weird, sleazy and gross, kind of like an over-the-top Times Square. I wouldn’t exactly call it family-friendly entertainment, but that’s not to say they weren’t any families with children present. And just when you thought you’ve seen it all, there’s something even more degenerate. It being Veterans Day weekend, the place was apparently especially busy for a Sunday night.  So people come from all over America and the world to see this, huh?  It’s actually really quite downscale compared to the Strip. For example, I don’t recall seeing scantily clad women dancing on the gaming tables in any of the Strip casinos, but there are in some of those in downtown Vegas.  Scott tells me that Las Vegas is about a decade ahead of the rest of America socially, so I guess this is what the rest of America will look like a decade or so down the road.
Herma was Scott’s DD, but after all that beer I car camped in situ. I chose a somewhat indirect route to Palm Desert via Laughlin and Bullhead City along the Colorado River to check out Lake Havasu City, Arizona on my way.  Lake Havasu in one of those places I’ve heard about a lot in recent years as a retirement destination, or at least as a winter haven for snowbird retirees since during the summer it’s one of the hottest places in the country.
Besides boating on the lake and activities like golf, the big tourist attraction in Lake Havasu City is London Bridge.  Well, sort of.  When London decided to replace its functionally obsolete historical structure with something more modern in the 1960s, a local entrepreneur offered to buy it and rebuild it in the Arizona desert. From what I’ve read, though, Lake Havasu’s London Bridge is a modern steel and concrete construction that’s only clad in the original bridge’s granite blocks, sort of a façade.  But it is a real bridge that carries traffic across a channel to an island in the lake, enough of an attraction for there to be a faux English shopping village on one shore.
Overall I found Lake Havasu to be a rather dry and dusty place, despite the ample nearby water in Lake Havasu, created by the Parker Dam on the Colorado River about 30 miles south. Some of those hot southwestern desert places like the Palm Springs and Phoenix area are relatively green and well landscaped, lush with desert and semi-tropical plants and very affluent in appearance. Lake Havasu seems to attract more working-class retirees, and the vegetation is relatively sparse.  In contrast to many southwestern cities which are built on flat plains with straight north-south and east-west streets intersecting at right angles, Lake Havasu City sprawls up into the hills. Water must be expensive since there are few lawns or lush gardens. You do really feel like you’re in the desert.
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