Day 17 – Grand Canyon to Lake Havasu

Sunrise over the Grand Canyon

We had some more time this morning to explore the canyon as we weren’t leaving till 10.30am. Consequently, myself, and a few others decided to get up in the early hours of the morning to watch the sunrise (which meant getting up at 4.20am in order to get the free shuttle bus over to the view point). It was totally worth it and the colours were much better this morning. There was a bit of cloud cover, which without would have made things even more spectacular, but even still, it was pretty awesome. As we were already out and about, we decided it would be worth going on another walk to see a different perspective of the canyon. This one was even more stunning than the one we did the evening before. I’m really grateful for the extra time we’ve had here to explore and it’s a shame we didn’t quite have as much time in Yosemite to do something similar – oh well.

We then set off towards are campsite for the trip, making a trip down the famous route 66. This was started in 1926 as the USA was starting to expand and railways were no longer sufficient. The route was built from Chicago and finishes up in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles, California. It passes through eight different states and three different time zones. We stopped off at a quirky little fast food restaurant, which served typical American food – burgers, fries and milkshake. As we were actually eating burgers for dinner, I had opted for packing my own lunch but I tried a strawberry and marshmallow milkshake, which was AMAZING! The restaurant had all sorts of memorabilia devoted to route 66, which was pretty cool.

London Bridge

We then headed off to Lake Havasu, our camp for the night, making a stop off at London Bridge, where very aptly it was raining. Yes, the one place it rained on the trip – London Bridge. Haha. This stop off point came from a man who wanted to create a retirement city in the middle of the desert and needed a unique attraction so bought the original London Bridge for $2.46m in the 1960s, although he actually thought he was getting Tower Bridge. At the time, there was nowhere to put the bridge, so he had a canal created as well, which I thought was a bit clean if it was meant to represent the River Thames…

Thankfully, the weather had cleared up by the time we reached our campsite, right by Lake Havasu, which was really stunning. We had an American themed party that night which was a really lovely way to spend our last night. We are off to LA tomorrow, via Joshua Tree national park.