Roy's on Route 66

Needles, California - January 14, 2007

We spend all day cruising north and east on back roads though the Mojave desert. The roads we choose have no gas stations or services.

At 29 Palms Mrs. Phred says turn right. I think straight ahead is the right decision. After five miles, we top a hill and the road suddenly ends and turns right. I brake hard and skid the RV and Toyota to a stop 20 feet into the desert. We both remember the first National Lampoon "Vacation" movie with Clark Griswald and family. We back out and turn right twice find Mrs Phred's road.

We finally hit Amboy. It's in the middle of a huge dry salt lake basin. Amboy is on the old Route 66. It became a ghost town when Interstate 40 was built 40 miles to the north.


There is a 6,000 year old volcano just outside town. The "Amboy Crater" is a National Landmark. A ranger runs a visitor center. Lonely duty.




Perhaps more interesting is the closed Roy's Motel, gas station and cafe. It has a 1950s look and is now owned by a preservationist. He also owns the first MacDonalds opened in San Diego, which he runs as a museum. You could have blown though here in 1957 in a a black Chrysler with tail fins and a big hemi V-8. Nostalgia.



We drive into Needles on the border for the night. London bridge is nearby. We buy green chili marmalade and a bottle of merlot at the camp store.

The Largest Living Tree (on Earth)

Sequoia National Park

I've always wanted to see a Sequoia Tree. They are inconveniently located at an elevation of 7,000 feet on the east side of the Cascade Mountains in California in the middle of nowhere.

The General Sherman tree (above) has a trunk volume of 53,000 cubic feet, a diameter of 37 feet, a height of 275 feet and an age of about 2,700 years. There is a mushroom that covers 2,200 acres in Oregon so General Sherman is not the largest living thing on Earth by volume...it's just a big tree.

By volume General Sherman is the largest tree on earth. The redwoods are taller and a Bristle cone in the Great Basin is far older.

These old trees have a tendency to topple over for no particular reason other than a shallow root system.

The  CCC Boys had a sense of humor. They carved out this tree tunnel after the giant toppled in the 1930s. Mrs Phred is driving the Honda.

The Sequoia trees are short and fat compared to the redwoods. The Crannel Creek Giant (a coastal Redwood) was about 25% bigger by volume than General Sherman, but it was cut down in the 1940s to make patio furniture. Here is Mrs. Phred in front of a small Sequoia tree.....I guess we need to go see the mushroom on the next trip....

The Nixon Library

Yorba Linda, California

The Nixon Presidential Library is located next to the house where Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California.

I have a goal of visiting all 13 of the Presidential Libraries. I think I'm still missing Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower  and the both the Bushes.

Nixon's time was tumultuous. You had to be there and be young to understand the anger over the war.

Give love a chance?

The Watergate section and timeline is very good with lots of touch screen videos and audio tapes. I spent a lot of time there remembering how all that unfolded.

 

The original "enemies" list included Leonard Bernstein. the list of 16 grew to 700. Nixon wanted the IRS to harass his enemies.

Richard and Pat Nixon are buried here. He lived 20 years after resigning.

Here is the house where Nixon was born.

Nixon came to Eisenhower's attention due to the notoriety he gained while investigating Alger Hiss...without that the world would have been different...

San Diego, California

It's possible that San Diego has the most pleasant weather in the continental United States. The average temperature is 72 degrees due to a phenomenon called the "marine layer"...

We spent the night in Julian, California. They used to mine gold there but now they mostly bake pies and cater to tourists.

 We hit San Diego about 10 in the morning and parked at the 1,400 acre Balboa Park. It has 14 museums and the San Diego zoo.

 We had some of these at our home in Tampa, but they seem to thrive here. I think they are called "bird of paradise" flowers.

We spent two nights on the beach. The boardwalk has a lot of young "hard-bodies" skateboarding, jogging, roller-skating  and jogging...

 We see two more presidential libraries in this area. Nixon's is up n San Clemente and Reagan's is in North L. A.  Maybe we can see them both tomorrow?

 I'd also like to see the Sequoia trees and Maybe Yosemite again before we start back to Las Vegas and then Arizona.

The San Diego Art Museum was worth the visit.

 Downtown.

 Train station.

 The Star of India and Mrs. Phred.

 Mrs. Phred in Old Town San Diego.

We had lunch in the old Coronado Hotel on Coronado Beach.

Officer Crocodile Dundee

Shelter Cove, California 

You get a very strange feeling driving though the Redwoods. It's very dark down there at the trunk level.



But.....wait....Officers in Independence, Missouri, responded to a call on a Saturday evening about a large alligator lurking on the embankment of a pond. An officer called a state conservation agent, who advised him to shoot the alligator because there was little that conservation officials could do at that time. As instructed, an officer shot the alligator, not once but twice, but both times the bullets bounced off -- because the alligator was made of cement.The property owner told police later that he placed the ornamental gator by the pond to keep children away.

Policemen can be cruel to their own. The Officer involved is almost certain to be tagged with a humorous but non-flattering nickname. Maybe "Gators Fear Me" or "Crocodile Dundee".

We spent the day cruising the redwoods and the coastal mountain back roads. We had hoped to see some tide pools after our long mountain drive to Shelter Cove. None of our pictures of the coastal tide pools or redwoods were very good due to the rain and fog. .

We did get some good flower pictures. They grow well in the dank, moist climate that redwoods prefer.

My humanities professor call this type of image "Chiaroscuro"  which sounds a lot like something you need to make Cuban Spanish bean soup.

 

We see many medical marijuana stores in this area, even in the smallest towns. I look into the laws and find that I need a California drivers license to assuage my anxiety or treat Mrs. Phred's back pains.

I think all the hippies from the 1967 Summer of Love must have moved to this area. We see many older ladies with long braided gray hair. They seem happy and pleasant. Not overweight. The men have strange beards, long hair and odd pants. I want to live here with my people, but Mrs. Phred wants more from life....

 Happy Trails....

Wish You Were Here

Mono Lake, California

This morning the sky was blue and the internet said that the wind on Mono Lake was zero, so I hustled on down to South Tufu at dawn while Mrs. Phred was still snoozing.

Conditions were a little off optimal, but the PIX were a lot better than the first time.

 There were three other freaks there snapping photos, including a Japanese lady with an expensive camera and tripod who was focused on the California gulls gobbling up the brine shrimp.

We went to June Lake and picked out our campsite for the next three nights with our friends George and Danielle from Sarasota.

We're surrounded by Aspen trees in our current campsite. Our automatic satellite dish is blocked so I dragged out the portable dish so Mrs. Phred can watch Wimbledon. There's a little hole where I can pick up the signal between the trees. I program the receiver to record the 20 scheduled Wimbledon broadcasts. We won't have shore power electricity the next few days, but I think I can crank up the inverter and record and see it all on battery power.

We drove to Bodie in the afternoon to see a huge gold rush ghost town. It's a state park that the California Governator is closing down because of the budget shortfall. I tell Mrs. Phred that the rating agencies are about to do a doubledip downgrade on California's debt rating. She's pragmatic...she says, "You'd have to be crazy to load money to the State of California...who cares what the rating agencies think?"

It seems that we will spend two weeks in this amazing area and still not see everything, no matter how hard we work. We want to see the "Devil's Postpile", Mammoth Lake, May Lake and other local scenic attractions. So many things to see...so little time.

That fool was the terror of Highway 101

The Redwoods

We checked out California highway 1, North of San Francisco. It is a good place to take coastal pictures but not where you would want to drive a big RV.

There were many miles of strangely uninhabited coast and mountain switchbacks. We took some pictures and retreated.

The only sensible way north along the California coast is up Highway 101.

He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots

And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back

He had a hopped-up 'cicle that took off like a gun

That fool was the terror of Highway 101

I always wanted a black leather jacket, but with a chicken on the back...that fool was the terror of Highway 101. I was 13 when that one came out...just then learning to smoke and applying lots of Wild Root Cream Oil to my duck's-tail haircut....when it rained, streams of black stuff would run down my face and neck....

We're in the middle of the redwoods again. Sometimes I feel like a small  asteroid circling the sun...All right redwoods.... here we come, swinging by on our predictable orbit. ... Hello big trees...how have you been.?....so long  big trees, goodbye again.

We go to the grocery store. All the customers look weird with long beards, strange clothing and soul patches. They are my lost people.

We see a large building with a medical apothecary marijuana sign. Next door is a hydroponics and indoor grow light store. I want to live here...as usual Mrs. Phred is a negative influence. I guess I'll just keep orbiting until my apogee decays?