Hello Friday, April 1st, 2022. Since our return from Mexico on March 16th, I’ve been busy writing up some seriously lengthy entries that more than a lot of words, were packed with a ton of images. Well, that grueling, though very satisfying, writing exercise and extension of immersion was accomplished just this past Tuesday morning. After working over a few other posts (all of them rants), I’m ready to post a couple, but I’m waiting for Caroline to give them the once over and, if need be, pull me back from the cliff of embarrassment.

But today’s post is not about the past yet; it’s about today, tomorrow, and the day after. We are heading to Los Angeles for the weekend. I’ve already raced through the things that are important to leaving, odds and ends kinds of things regarding cleaning and the sort. Now I’m parked at Starbucks trying to fluff this blog post as travel days are typically light on sharing experiences when the majority of the time is in the car before arriving at the destination looking to check in to our hotel (boring) and then go get something to eat (tired), and so there’s that. Maybe we should mix things up, try to get out even earlier and race over to the ocean for some sunset shots of us walking on the beach.

This brings up the idea that social media only shares the side of us we want seen, the side that reflects a kind of skewed perfection. While that may be mostly true, I don’t think anyone reading this could believe that things weren’t pretty good here on our 6th trip together in the first quarter of the year. And that is after 33 years together! Oh god, then I have to go and think of those young social influencers Tom and Alexis Sharkey (or did I mean Gaby Petito and Brian Laundrie?) who died in a murder/suicide situation, and though I’ve never seen or watched their social media lives, I understood they only portrayed things as perfect.

With my coffee done, the music pummeling me with insipid Broadway show tunes, and, well, nothing much else to say, I’m going to wrap things up here, head home, and pester Caroline to leave even earlier (she’ll not budge as she’s doing that work thing that pays for all this Dolce Vita). My next words will arrive from another state, California.

We are sitting in a Starbucks in Palm Desert, California, after pulling off the I-10 Freeway because we were warned that 30 miles ahead there’s an hour delay due to an accident. With the option of sitting amidst the aggression of people who can’t go anywhere or pulling up a chair for a coffee, some ice water, the always-appreciated toilet, wifi to do exactly what I’m doing at this moment, we’ll opt for this chill moment. The photos below are definitely not Palm Desert.

It’s already 6:00 p.m. with about two hours left before reaching our hotel, but before we get to that, we stopped at Desert Center for some roadside relief for Caroline about an hour prior to this stop at Starbucks, which should tell you how urgent that need was because we swore off ever stopping at this exit again, forever and ever kind of swore off. You see, we stopped here a dozen or more years ago when the gas station was still operating and determined that this corner of our travels was likely one of the creepiest we’d yet seen. Well, other than the post office, everything here is toast, including the couple parked in front of the broken pumps just smoking a joint, taking in the ambiance

The burger joint is boarded up.

The cafe and garage are no longer in business…

…though somehow the cafe has avoided being ransacked. As I was looking for info on when the cafe shut down, 2012 was the year I found a brilliant article detailing the auctioning off of much of what belonged to the family that once owned the town. Check it out at Never Quite Lost; it features some terrific photos.

What remains of the old market after the roof caved in?

This might have been an old-school facility, but we couldn’t be sure, and we weren’t very interested in exploring buildings that might offer us ticks, bed bugs, black widow spiders, collapsing floors, or skeletons.

As we were getting ready to drive away, I asked Caroline to look up the history of Desert Center, and that’s when things got even more interesting. Once upon a time, long ago a man by the name of Sidney R. Garfield set up shop in this town to care for injuries happening to the men working on the Colorado River Aqueduct nearby. Nearly bankrupt, he was visited by Henry J. Kaiser, head of Kaiser Steel, one of the companies involved with the Aqueduct project, who convinced Garfield to head with him to the Grand Coulee Dam where instead of treating 5,000 men, he’d be dealing with 50,000 which would be far more financially viable. From this partnership, Kaiser Permanente was born. Now, if you don’t know about this California company and the nine states it services, this will probably mean nothing to you. For us, though, this is as cool as passing through Ft. Thomas, Arizona, where the founder of the Lions Club, Melvin Jones, was born, or learning of Hi Jolly (Hadji Ali) and his Camel Corps in Quartzsite, Arizona.

Not sure if people used to stay here or were murdered here. Enough of Desert Center, we return to Starbucks over in Palm Desert.

After maybe 30 minutes, it appeared the heavy traffic on the freeway was clearing up, so we got back on the road. It’ll be 8:00 before we reach our dinner location at El Gallo Giro in Fontana. It’s been years since we’ve been there, and it turns out that it might still be years to come as, at the last minute, we opted to drop in on the Northwoods Inn in Covina we’ve not visited in a few years at least.

We arrived at 8:45; they close at 9:30. Seated by 9:10, our order was made in 2 seconds as there was no need to think about what we were going to have. Now, if only our hotel room was upstairs, we wouldn’t have had this 40-minute drive through traffic mayhem to Korea Town. It’s 11:30 as I write this, and I’m as tired as can be, but that’s okay; we are on a much-needed mini-vacation after hanging out in Phoenix for 15 days straight. Don’t pity us, though; we are trying to do the best we can now that we’re so ancient…heck we’re so old that when I wrote that, I had the beat in my head from KLF’s Justified and Ancient with Tammy Wynette, yep, we’re that old.