Lake Havasu City, 200 Miles from Everything but Muscle

I could do without visiting Arizona, the ultra-red state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio was torturing jail inmates, it is illegal to teach Hispanic culture, and the racist, antisemitic, and homophobic comments by Jeff Flake's teenage son were shrugged off (that was in 2013; Tanner has since enrolled at Brigham Young University, where 0.5% of the students are black, and "none" are gay).

Besides, it's too hot, and Phoenix goes on forever -- 73 miles from the north end to the south end.

But if I'm going to visit anywhere, it's definitely not going to be Lake Havasu City, a small town about 200 miles from the nearest gay bars (in Las Vegas and Phoenix), 300 miles from a decent museum (in Los Angeles), about as far from civilization as you're going to get in the U.S..

Havasu isn't even a real lake. It's a reservoir on the Colorado River, created by the Parker Dam in 1934. In 1958, Robert McCullough, a chainsaw entrepreneur, bought property and built a city there. For some reason, 50,000 people moved in, even though there was nothing to do but swim, fish, and putter around in boats.

McCullough added to the presumed tourist appeal in 1968, when he bought the famous London Bridge from the City of London and had it transported, stone by stone, to Lake Havasu. You can walk across it, except why would you want to? It looks like every other bridge in the world, and it goes from nowhere to nowhere.

Lake Havasu City is least educated city in the U.S., with the smallest percentage of college graduates. No colleges except some extensions. No decent used bookstore, no decent museums, a bar with a "gay and lesbian night" once a week.

Yawn. Wake me when we get to Vegas.

But it has a surprising amount of beefcake potential.