California Dreamin'

 First, I’ve made a correction to my last post. Albert Okura, who bought the town of Amboy, California and restored Roy’s Café, is a U.S. businessman. (He owns the Juan Pollo chain of restaurants, which explains why the Barstow Juan Pollo location is also called “Roy’s” with a sign to match.)

Amboy Road northbound

We were on our way back on the Amboy Road towards the final stretch of Route 66. There was a political sign, somewhere near Noels Knoll Road, that one wouldn’t associate with as “blue” a state as California. The landscape told the same story: this stretch of desert was in total contrast to the Pacific beaches and glittering cities of the coast. It’s worth remembering that similar variety, of both people and place, exists in every state.

For example: The town of Joshua Tree, where we’d spent the night, was crazy crowded. There’s one licensed restaurant and the wait there was over an hour. We had difficulty finding anywhere else to eat: there was a combined Indian and pizza place, never a good idea, that for reasons unexplained was doing takeout only. We didn’t want to stink up the motel room, so we ended up getting Subway sandwiches from the gas station. At breakfast restaurants were just as crowded; luckily, we were first in line at the takeout place. Lox bagels and lattes. We must be in California!

Back at Amboy, we turned left (west) and headed for the former site of Bagdad.

Through the 1960s, when Route 66 was in its heyday, Bagdad was a real town. There was a hotel, school, and churches, and even a Harvey House railroad hotel. Today, literally all that remains to mark the site of the town is this tree.

Most ghost towns along Route 66 have been allowed slowly to decompose, but in 1991 Bagdad was purposely razed to the ground. Now, what happened in ’91 to cause someone to want to destroy a place with a similarly spelled name to a city in Iraq? Just saying, there’s a Marine base squatted square across Route 66 some way west of here. (Bagdad might actually have been razed for a gas pipeline storage area, but there's not even any trace of that now.)

 

We continued to Ludlow, where there’s been a café since the 1940s. We weren’t hungry, but stopped in anyway. 

One of the waitresses, who was wearing the same T-shirt as I’d bought in Tucumcari as a souvenir, asked T. if she’d been on some TV show. (Apparently T. resembles the basketball coach.) I then overheard the other waitress answer a customer who was looking for the Bagdad Café. Given that Bagdad is gone, the café is actually in Newberry Springs; but what interested me was the waitress’s advice not to take I-40, but the frontage road/National Trails Highway. I had read that this was a nice drive, but in very rough condition.

“Is it drivable now?” I asked the waitress, and she said yes, it had been recently repaved! So there, it pays to sit and have a coffee at the Ludlow Café.

Ludlow was a 19th-century mining town.

We took off down 27 miles of the National Trails Highway, towards Newberry Springs.

The Bagdad Café was a film site for a cult movie that I’ve never seen. It was renamed for the movie (the original Bagdad Café having gone the way of Bagdad.) This café is supposed to still be open and selling buffalo burgers. Sadly, it was not.

There appeared to be little more left of Daggett. Some of the buildings that do remain, though, date back to more than a century ago, when a lot of silver and borax was mined around here. Daggett is also where the Joad family faced a California inspection station in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

As mentioned earlier, a Marine Logistics Base was built just astride Route 66 and, due to the closure of its east gate for security reasons, the old Route is now completely inaccessible at this point. We were forced onto I-40, only to exit again as if we were visiting the base, before following Main Street into downtown Barstow.

Our original plan had been to stop in Barstow for the night. It’s been a major crossroads since the railroad days,

and we remembered a great night and day spent there ten years ago, between Yosemite National Park and Las Vegas. Memorable, not only because we got to wash our clothes, but because it was warm enough to take our clothes off and actually have showers, for the first time in days! But the laundry was done now, and we decided to press on farther so as to shorten the driving on our last day.

Barstow is a great downtown to look around, and of course we’d missed that before, traveling on the interstate and staying in the modern part of town. You won’t be surprised by now to learn that Barstow also has one of Fred Harvey’s railroad hotels.

I’d recognize Fred and the Harvey Girls anywhere, now that we’d stayed in La Posada in Winslow. The Harvey House, Casa del Desierto, is just north of Route 66, across the First Street Bridge.

This historic picture of the bridge is one of many delightful exhibits we saw in the Route 66 Mother Road Museum, which is free, and housed in Casa del Desierto. The staff were very friendly. Actually, this particular exhibit might have been in the Western America Railroad Museum, located in the same building. Both were worth visiting. Casa del Desierto itself, originally built in 1885, was rebuilt in 1913 after a fire by—you guessed it—Mary Colter. 

Amtrak still stops here.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Four-lane Route 66 became I-15, and today, most traffic is on the interstate, rushing to or from Vegas. The Route west of Barstow is now peaceful two-lane. All that I glimpsed of the town of Hodge (pop. 431) was a false-front saloon. A vintage billboard advertising gas prices was a reminder of the old days.

A little farther on from Helendale is one of Route 66’s quirkiest roadside attractions, the Bottle Tree Ranch.

Elmer Long created this installation of “found object” art from a bottle collection he started with his father. Sadly, Long has since passed away, but the ranch is still open and free to visit during daylight hours. It made me reminisce about my own childhood collecting bottles.

And typing on typewriters

The next town, Oro Grande, has a big cement plant. At least there’s still industry, and life, in the area and its tiny downtown.

We didn’t stop long in Victorville, but the town has a role in film history. It Came From Outer Space was filmed here, and it’s also where Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote Citizen Kane. A change from The Grapes of Wrath, anyway.

At this point in the afternoon, we finally had to join I-15. There was suddenly a ton of traffic, but it wasn’t the worst road to go slowly on, as we reached Cajon Summit (4,000 feet).

Only five years ago, the iconic Summit Inn was destroyed in the Blue Cut wildfire. As a reminder of another type of disaster to which California is prone, the Cajon Pass through which the interstate winds was formed by the movements of the San Andreas Fault. More recently in geological time, but still before the railroad or Route 66, the Mormon Trail passed through here.

View of the train

From this most scenic of traffic jams, we exited to take the former four-lane. Its westbound lanes are now two-lane Route 66. We could see Cajon Creek—or rather, we couldn’t; it was so dry I couldn’t even make out where the creek should be. This, also, was not a good sign for California.

 

Dusk was starting to fall and we were glad to reach our destination for the night. “I have a bit of song in my head,” T. said, “and it goes like this: ‘San Bernardino🎵’” I waited for her to sing more, but that was all she remembered!

She might have been thinking of “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” by Bobby Troup (his wife, Cynthia, came up with the title on their own road trip across the country to Hollywood). Given the traffic always present in Los Angeles, which Route 66 drivers have to negotiate on the final day, San Bernardino is a natural overnight stop. Downtown had several vintage motels with neon signs, some lit up, as well as a Mexican restaurant run by the same family since 1937. 

 

But, I’m afraid we didn’t stop at any of these. No, for our penultimate night we’d decided to book—and this is why we had to push on, close to the Rialto city limits—one of the kitschiest locations on a road that has so many of them: the Wigwam Motel.

The “wigwams” (concrete tepees, actually) were built as part of a cross-country chain, but only two of the motels remain today. One is in Holbrook, Arizona, and we were booked at the other. This is a 1949 motor court, now kept in great condition and run by the award-winning Jack Patel and family (Indian Americans, not to be confused with American Indians!) I know, it's terrible, but I just loved staying here. You would not believe how roomy our place was inside.

Tomorrow was going to be busy. We rested up for our last day.