Day 12: The Mother Road

After our awful night, we were slow getting started this morning. The breakfast area was pretty crowded. It had no hot breakfast option other than waffles. It only had one worker staffing the overcrowded, overbusy location, and she wasn’t very friendly or helpful (though, that might be due to being over worked and stressed.) And yes, I’m entitled to whine, because normally this particular hotel chain has great service, very nice rooms, and a decent hot breakfast buffet. I was really unpleasantly surprised at these lacks in this particular location.


Anyway, on the road we got, just slightly before ten instead of our intended 9am. We had to make a stop for some product to help de-odorize the van from last night’s mishap.

Our second unpleasant surprise of the morning was that though google maps put our next destination at just over four hours away, our Tom Tom was now telling us it was going to take nearly five and a half hours to get there. Since our next stop closed at 4pm, this was a concern. (And experience had proved the TomTom’s time estimations were more accurate than Google maps).

We decided to drive like the Californians did, which was to put greater priority on the flow of traffic than the posted speed limit. (Which wasn’t that hard to do, since there were very few speed limits posted.) We also skipped a lunch stop. Greasy fast food would have been asking for trouble anyway.

After our wonderful lesson on how to throw up in a paper bag, Toa laid down in the bag seat and Sweetling took the clean middle seat and we kept the windows down for a little while to give our deodorizer time to work.

We passed around the healthy snack bag a couple of times through the drive. Toa slept for a few hours and woke up his normal perky self. (He is currently throwing stuffed animals around the hotel room while the Jedi, Sweetling and I are all on laptops and netbooks.)

We hit Barstow California at ten after three and headed for the Route 66 Museum.

The museum was small, but packed full of nostalgia items.

The Jedi loved the classic Mustang,

But I preferred the Model T.

Complete with a "Horseless Carriage" license plate.

Personally, I loved that many of the items in their collection came with a narrative often told by the individual who had donated the item.

Including the old telephone switchboard. The first telephone operator said that she used to bring her knitting in to work on between calls, because there were so few phones in Barstow, she didn’t have much to do.

The Jedi talked to the couple manning the front desk. They had been from Cleveland, but had moved to California 10 years ago. As we were signing the visitors book, we noticed that someone from Norway had also signed in that day. The couple we were talking with said yes, the Norwegians sometimes had their motorcycles shipped to Chicago. Then they would fly to Chicago and ride their motorcycles down Historic 66 all the way from Chicago to Santa Monica, and then they would have their motorcycles shipped back to Norway and fly home. As we were leaving, someone from France was just coming in and going up to the counter. The Jedi thought I should practice my French and chat with him, but I went mind blank.

For dinner, we headed over to Denapoli’s Firehouse Italian Restaurant.

It was very nice. Good food, generous portions, super attentive and friendly waitress, and a bunch of old firehouse memorabilia. We stuffed ourselves to the gills. I tried to take some pictures of the big old pump on the second landing, but couldn’t get a clear shot of it.

Back at the hotel, the Jedi took Toa swimming (told you he was feeling better), Sweetling hung out in the room for some quiet time with her netbook, and I went to throw Toa’s disgusting clothes from yesterday in the coin operated machine in the hotel’s little courtesy laundry room. I went to the front desk to buy detergent, but she gave me a small box of detergent and a box of two dryer sheets and told me not to worry, the first boxes were ‘on the house’. See, this is the kind of service I’m used to.

So, now, I’m hanging out on the bed, waiting for the clothes to be dry. The Jedi is trying to cash in our point rewards for some free hotel stays, and Sweetling is chuckling over some Anime forum that she doesn’t want to share with me. Toa has gotten tired of throwing his stuffed animals from one bed to the other, and has climbed up beside me. He would like a turn to write.

Here you go Toa, knock yourself out.

I have just been handed my netbook back. He raised his hands above the keyboard to just pound on the keys. I said, “Write something real. You know how to spell.”

My netbook came back to me immediately. Writing something real and figuring out the spelling sounds suspiciously like work to the Toa. He would rather hang on my elbow and mess up my keystrokes.

Tomorrow is mother’s day gyghcgughoichi

Toa decided to write after all. Look how sneaky he was about getting in some random keystrokes. He is quite pleased with himself for this victory.

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