Needles, CA - Lake Havasu, CA

I woke up today excited to finally leave California and head into Lake Havasu, Arizona. I love my state and knew I would miss home, but it's hard to feel like you're making progress when you've been cycling for nearly 3 weeks and are still in the same state. Plus, we only had 45 miles, which has now turned into an 'easy day'. I was selected to 'sweep' that day, which mean you and one other cyclist are responsible for staying behind all of the other cyclists so that the crew members know that when you pass, all of the cyclists are accounted for I swept with Ethan Heine (Colorado), one of the faster guys on the team.
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The day went a lot longer than we had expected.--45 miles goes a lot slower when you have to stop for everyone with a flat tire or a messed up chain. We met up with a bunch of ride-alongs (basically guest cyclists) at  a gas station about 15 miles outside of Lake Havasu, who matched up with our team pacelines to ride with us into Lake Havasu. After a very strong and hot headwind, and a few nasty hills, we finally arrived at the WalMart in Lake Havasu, where we had a few police motorcycles ready to escort us into town. Our arrival was longer than we had anticipated--about 10 miles total averaging 12 mph. We finally arrived at our destination, the local community center/aquatic center, where they had a huge sub-sandwich set up for lunch, along with awesome goodie bags prepared for us from the Chamber of Commerce and Lake Havasu Journey of Hope Arrival Committee. When we had eaten lunch, we all went in the vans and to the lake for an afternoon on a houseboat, courtesy of the local yacht club. The boat was great--there was plenty of food, and  the water felt great after a very hot cycling day. More importantly, downtime is rare on JOH, so it was nice to just relax for a little while. After a few hours on the lake, we went back to the aquatic center to shower up and get ready for dinner. Dinner that night was a potluck dinner/Friendship Visit, with lots of people from the Lake Havasu City Community coming through with great food (including about 6 different pasta salads). There was a live band playing lots of different cover songs after dinner, which we rocked out to with our new friends. After the band played their last song, we all cleaned up the gym which we ate in and said bye to our new friends.

Even though it was late, a few of us decided to head into the town to check out some of the bars.  Unfortunately, because it was a Sunday night, there was literally nobody else out at the bars, and the place we had heard sold $1 tacos turned out to not have any such deal. We stuck around there anyway, had a few beers, and went back to lodging to get some sleep before our much-anticipated day off.