Ultimately, it took 10 years, to obtain a 10-year lease with a 5-year option, a term that was one year less than our original lease with the Fish and Wildlife.
            In spite of all of this, my parents continued to develop Havasu Palms. By 1978, a new store and marina was completed. In 1980, my father began construction on Roads End Restaurant.   He’d been collecting used restaurant equipment, and purchased red roof tile from a demolished schoolhouse, which eventually roofed our restaurant.  After winning a liquor license in the California liquor lottery, he was pressured to finish the restaurant within the timeframe specified by the lottery rules. The restaurant opened in 1981, ten years to the day, after the London Bridge officially opened, in October 10, 1971.
            My parents always preferred the original name of the park, which is why they named the restaurant the Road’s End Restaurant and Bar.
            Just as they were hands-on with the clean up and construction of the park, they fully participated in running the restaurant.  My father served time as chef and bartender, and my mother waited tables and did what she did best, cleaned. The restaurant was not an easy business to maintain.   No food distributor would deliver supplies, and so my father built a large cargo boat, that would travel to Lake Havasu City each week to pick up supplies.  It was too difficult for employees to travel back and forth to work. The restaurant was seasonal and my parents provided employee housing.
           Over the years, the Road’s End Restaurant and bar became a very popular local establishment.  The party size was commonly ten to twelve people. Its house drink, nicknamed the Green Thing sold over 9000 drinks each season.
          After the lease was signed in 1984, Havasu Palms continued to improve the park.  By 1986, they completed 100 new boat slips, and in 1987, nine new mobile home sites were added.  In 1989 the first real telephone system came into the park, when Contel added a microwave dish, and my father prepared the trenches. That year he added a breakwater to the harbor. It was also the year, in which Dad came down with congestive heart failure.

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Photo: Havasu Palms docks, circa late 1990's