a human sea of poinsettias

We have arrived at Redlands California. We left Needles midmorning. We met some people who were camping behind us who have been on the road for the last 8 years. They were from Lamoyne (?) Maine. That is up somewhere near Bar Harbor. They move around and usually look for work in the campgrounds they stay in. They get free camping and the facilities that go with it and stay for a couple of months then move on to another campground. They belong to Coast to Coast and about 4 other similar groups so they have a large base of low cost campgrounds to work with. They seem to like the western desert areas. They will be leaving in a couple of weeks to move up near Las Vegas for a while.

Breaking camp has gotten easy. This time though we had connections to break and had to load up the trailer which we had taken off so we could get into the camping space. We headed out and immediately had the same old overheating problem. The temperature gauge did not show it but the oil pressure started dropping. I pulled off the highway and came to a stop just off the Flashlight Exit. There was nothing there. No gas stations, no stores, not even a wide spot in the road. I checked the oil and knew the overheating was happening again. Smoke came off the dipstick and you could just feel the heat coming off the engine. I let it sit for a while and then tried it again with no improvement. Eventually on the third or fourth try, the temperature gauge went up as did the oil pressure. It was a good thing because the town of Flashlight was about 30 miles away and there was nothing near for help.

We set out again but had to turn around in a space that was all dug up. I didn’t think we would have anything left on the shelves but eventually we got back on the road and then the highway. As we drove along, the oil pressure stayed up but the temperature started to drop. To my feeble mind, the “new” thermostat stuck closed to start off and eventually opened while we were parked. It remained open totally so the coolant never stayed at the normal driving temperature but it is better to have it stick open than closed. The only problem comes when you need heat and that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

We continued on and entered the Mojave Desert. What a spectacular area. It is hard to describe. It was vast and pretty much gravel and rocks with some vegetation. There were mountains in the distance and the road climbed up and up. This is one of the areas referred to as the “High Desert”. There were exits to the highway but they drove off into the distance with no visible sign of a town. Every 20 or 30 miles there would be an exit with gas and food and then back to the dessert.

The night we were in Needles, I wrote an email to Flying J’s corporate headquarters telling them about the $4.93 a gallon tank of gas that I got in Winslow, AZ. I told them that I had asked for an explanation and didn’t get much of one. I asked them if they could give me any reason for this sudden and isolated price jump. In the middle of the Mojave, my phone rang. It was Bob Barnet from Flying J. He was very apologetic about the problem and said that it was a mistake. He told me they would refund the difference. I drove into the FJ in Barstow, CA a couple of hours later and met with the manager Chris. He made a copy of my gas slip and gave me a $55 refund for the 54.5 gallons of gas I bought in Winslow. Then as a payment for suffering and pain, he treated us to lunch in the FJ restaurant. They have a decent menu and a really nice buffet. We ate, bought a couple of bottles of cold water, a bag of ice and hit the road again hoping we wouldn’t have truck problems again. We didn’t.

The FJ in Barstow was located on Andy Devine Road.

We continued through the desert finding a place in the distance that looked like it had been burned over. As we got closer, we realized that this was an area where volcanic rock was scattered over the ground. All of this black looked so out of place amidst the desert.

Soon we made the turn onto I-15 and headed into the San Bernardino Mountains. We climbed and climbed and climbed. Considering that we had just crossed the High Desert, I am not sure how high we got but the downhill was a spectacular 12 miles long, had a special truck lane and a special truck speed limit of 45 mph. That was agonizing. I felt like I was crawling down the mountain and the cars were flying by. I was in good company as all the trucks were going the same speed. Not too much cheating on the speed limit there. Halfway down, there was one of those runaway truck exits with the deep soft sand/gravel. There wasn’t anything in it but there were a couple of sets of tracks in the soft sand. Those are really lifesavers when you need them. They look silly but I once saw one with a truck halfway up mired up to the axles in sand. He had lost his breaks and most certainly would have been part of the landscape if it were not for the escape road.

After a while, we hit the city roads. Los Angeles is a city like no other. It has a complex highway system intertwined with other highway systems. We had some rudimentary directions but the lack of distances did not prepare us for the vast distances between their landmarks. We would make a turn then start looking for the next landmark and find it was a half hour away. That doesn’t do much for your self confidence. You start to think you missed it and doubt what you have done especially when you find roads named similarly to the road you are looking for. Our campground is in Redlands. We drove into Redlands, drove through Redlands and then out of Redlands into 3 other towns before we found the road we were looking for. We found the campground, unloaded the car and stored the trailer and got all set up. There are 3 fishing ponds here. We are in the third row by the first pond. We have these huge eucalyptus trees which provide shade throughout the morning and into the afternoon. Later on the sun drops behind our camper so our “yard” space is in shade most of the time.

We have our site and are set up. There are 3 fishing ponds here and we are near to pond 1. They have catfish and bass in them. I have not seen anyone catch anything but have been told that they do catch them. The little store here sells fishing equipment but I am not interested in fishing here.

We walked around the place on Monday night and checked it all out. We met some of the residents in the rec hall. They were gathering to play a card game called 65. They asked us to play but we were on our rounds so we moved off. We said we would be back for the Celtics game on Tuesday. There are several buildings here including a craft shop, laundry and a restaurant. It seems that nothing is open until Friday/Saturday/Sunday. There are relatively few people here during the week. It is quiet except for the trains. The tracks are right across the street from the campground and is a main trunk line coming off the docks at the port of Long Beach. There are 2 tracks and they are busy. About every 15 minutes during the day and a little less often at night. They haul mostly containers double stacked on the cars but also other things. There is one train that passes 2 or 3 times a day with nothing but gravel. That gets loaded on a ship and hauled somewhere. We also see lots of lumber, mostly in plastic wrapped lifts but some open to the air.

In the daytime, you just hear the trains with their big diesel engines (2 to 5 pulling the train and occasionally another 2 pushing the train). At night, they blow whistles at the crossing up the street. You do get used to it after a couple of days.

Tuesday, we took the day off. We did some things around camp and met some more of the denizens of Fisherman’s Retreat. Jack is the electrician for the camp. He is a colorful friendly guy that pulls up often in his golf cart and visits. He has lived around this area for quite some time and has offered advice on out of the way places to visit.

We took him up on one of them yesterday. We had a repairman in to work on our camper. He fixed the refrigerator and front air conditioner (tough to be without in this weather). In the afternoon we set off for Pioneer Town. This was a place built by Roy Rogers and other western actors as a place to film westerns. Several western TV shows and movies were filmed there and the buildings are still there. Many of them are private residences but on some weekends a group comes in and does reenactments in the town. It is a dusty dirt roaded town with wooden sidewalks. Most everything has seen better days but it is truly authentic. Nothing was open but the bowling alley. This was built in the 1940s or early 50s and has been open ever since. It is dingy but they have a bar and some great testimonial signed pictures on the walls. Roy threw the first ball on opening day. The original sound stage is still there but it wasn’t open. Jack says it is open once in a while. The post office (right next to the sheriff’s office, claims to be the most photographed post office in the country.

This town is set in a desert setting high up in a rocky area. It has a really winding road which climbs up from Yucca Valley in a really spectacular manner. The town suffered a fire a few years ago which didn’t affect the town but did devastate the surrounding area. Before we went up to the town, we stopped at a place called the “Jelly Doughnut”. We had a coffee and a huge jelly doughnut that was just brim full of red jelly. Jack had told us about the place but I think I have seen a reference to it on the Food Channel. After we visited Pioneer Town, we returned to Yucca Valley and had lunch at John’s. Their claim to fame is their pastrami sandwich. It is in a medium sub type roll and is just loaded with pastrami. One of the great sandwiches.

I need to regress slightly. On Wednesday, we journeyed to Pasadena for Ashton’s graduation (did I mention that it was in the Rose Bowl?). We met Ashton and his mother and brother in a nearby town and had a little celebration then headed for the Rose Bowl. There were 551 graduates and they were dressed in Red caps and gowns. There was a covered area on the field for the band and dignitaries but the graduates sat in the lower section of the grandstand. They stretched the length of the field and looked like a sea of Poinsettias. Behind them was the crowd of parents, relatives and friends. They did a pretty good job of filling the next couple of sections up the grandstand and a few sections beyond. It was a nice graduation. The principal spoke and gave us some history of the accomplishments of this class and then the Salutatorian (3.97 GPA) read Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” and related that to their futures. Then the Valedictorians (yes s, there were 4 of them all with a 4.0 GPA) spoke. One talked about how she had done nothing but work on school stuff and as she went along learned to reach out and find other things to do even to get a boyfriend at which time another of the graduates stood up and pointed to himself with both hands.

On a couple of occasions, students blew up beach balls and started to throw them around. Teachers ran after them and confiscated them taking them to one particular teacher who had some sharp object that he would stab the ball over and over again to the boos of the students and crowd. Toward the end, some of the lights came on and the graduation finished under the lights.

When we got there, a group of blue graduates were leaving. This is a busy place during the graduation season with several schools using the facilities. As we left (having only a rudimentary idea of where we were going), I picked out a sporty looking car that belonged to either a student or a younger relative of a student. I liked the look of him (or her) as they turned in the opposite direction to the exiting traffic and drove toward the opposite end of the parking lot. They u-turned at a blocked entrance (or exit as it were), took a hard right into a small special parking lot, drove over a sidewalk and curb and escaped out a side road with no traffic leading right up to an onramp on the 215. We were free. I waved thank you to the car that obviously didn’t see me and headed back for camp.

After pioneer town, we headed down the road a ways to Joshua Tree National Monument. We bought our National Park Pass (we have many more to enter and I am still 2 months short of my 62+ $10 forever pass) and toured the park. It was 103 degrees and that changed very little until the end of our tour when we descended several thousand feet towards I 10. It rose to 110. The park was spectacular if not desolate. We saw relatively few cars in our few hours there. We drove through one of the campgrounds and found 1 group camping there. Summer has either not hit high gear or the schools are not out yet. Several radio stations over the weekend said their schools were getting out so I do not know where everyone is.

Well, that about catches us up. We are still searching for our touring legs and are enjoying some relaxing time. We did head over to the rec hall on Tuesday for the Celtic’s game. In spite of hearing how big crowds gather for the games between the Lakers and the Celts, there was one person there and he couldn’t figure out how to change the channel on the TV. The remote didn’t work so you had to change it on the box.

As you may or may not know, the Celts took an early LARGE lead and never relinquished it. At halftime, he mumbled something about checking up on his dog and never came back (I was wearing a Celtics shirt). A woman wandered in during the third period, looked at the score, muttered some unkind words and left abruptly. She did drop into our campsite last night praising the Celtics and saying they deserved the win. Then she noticed my Patriots shirt and started talking about the Raiders. I asked her if she would like me to go get my Red Sox shirt. She said following sports in Boston must be really fun these days. I agreed but said we suffered long and hard to get here.

Ok, now I am really caught up. I think we will head into LA today and check out Hollywood…show Cheryl the Hollywood sign from close up and maybe head out to Venice Beach although Jack suggests that over the weekend would be better. Another dilemma??

See Ya

Clayton & Cheryl

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