Many Moons Ago, my Gentleman Caller took me away for a suprise weekend of tramping about the desert.
We went to Joshua Tree, which was much like Northern Ontario (rocks and trees and trees and rocks, and rocks and trees and trees and rocks, and waterrrrr), only completely different (rocks and cacti and cacti and rocks, and rocks and cacti and cacti and rocks and sannnnnnnnd).
Aaron wore his jaunty, cactus-inspectin’ hat.
And no, this is not a picture of me emerging from a giant cement vulva!
It is a picture of me emerging from a giant cement (historically inaccurate and somewhat offensive but we’ll let it slide just this once cause it was the 1950s) teepee! My Gentleman Caller is very good at helping me fulfill my insatiable need to experience as much novelty architechture as possible. We stayed at the Wigwam Motel in lovely, scenic Rialto!
Rialto has some very good mid-centuriness happening in it, like DJ’s Coffee Shop, which had tasty tasty breakfast.
And the next day we went on a hilarious ghost town tour, stopping in Calico, a mining town turned ghost town turned historical re-enactment site/theme park at some point in the 60s that has changed very little since and thus remains hilarious and weird,
And we went to California City, a weird planned city/social experiment that never really worked out – you should read about it. All that’s there are the roads that were laid out for a city that was planned, but never populated because, shockingly, nobody wanted to move out to the middle of the desert.
And then there was this, the most glorious sign I’ve ever seen, on a sadly closed-down drive in, somewhere outside Barstow:
