L.A. to Needles

Whew! Talk about a long day! We started at the Santa Monica Pier at about 10am, and pulled into Needles at 8pm. It's only 300 miles or so, but Route 66 takes a lot longer than the freeway!

We drove east on Santa Monica Blvd. all the way to downtown L.A. (and by the way: did you know there's an outdoor BBQ place at the corner of Sunset and Figueroa? It looks great!). Then we headed north to Pasadena and then east, on Colorado and Foothill most of the way, to San Bernardino. And from there, it was the desert all the way to Needles.


You could see the damage wrought by the coming of the Interstate: we passed the remnants of town after town -- seeing nothing but closed gas stations, restaurants and boarded-up houses and businesses. But there also were some cool things: a tree decorated with hundreds of bottles, another with hundreds of shoes; clean, clean air; the Amboy Crater (which was an active mini-volcano spewing ash and lava as recently as 500 years ago); and Roy's Cafe at Amboy, which is now closed, although they still sell t-shirts and hope to reopen soon. The people who live there have a really cool dog named Miko. I think (other than the pool at the hotel here) petting Miko was the highlight of the day for Lulu.



Now about these pictures:

We took some shots of Lulu at the Santa Monica Pier, generally accepted as the beginning (terminus?) of the Mother Road.* She was thrilled to stop there and be our model.

Then we stopped at Rialto to take pictures of the famous Wigwam Motel. By this time, Lulu was not so thrilled to be in pictures.

Then we stopped at the Bagdad Cafe, where the movie Bagdad Cafe was shot. By then, she REALLY didn't want to have her picture taken any more. Her only comment: "It's just a movie! Take it easy!"

By the time we reached the Amboy Crater, she was in a better mood, and thought the Crater was pretty cool. The lava field there covers a 24-square mile area, and the idea of burning lava covering dinosaurs was pretty exciting to her. She kept imagining she saw dinosaur shapes in the lava rocks. (We don't know if there really were dinosaurs there at the time, but what the heck--it made her happy and she was willing to pose for another picture.) The wind was blowing like crazy, and the temperature was 110 degrees. But hey -- it was a dry heat.


* While Santa Monica Pier is traditionally considered the end-point of the beloved Mother Road, some sources indicate the less glamorous intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Avenue to be the technical terminus; there's even a plaque in Palisades Park suggesting this.