Route 66: Las Vegas to LA

We first stopped to get some fuel from a small place called Jean – where they had 96 bowsers and most of them were being used when we pulled in!

We then drove about 30 miles to Goodsprings to have breakfast at the Pioneer Hotel – apparently the oldest tavern in Nevada – it was a very weird, dark place where food took forever to come out and they brought everything in single-use containers.

We drove past Sin City sky diving as we left, then kept driving till we reached Peggy Sue diner in Yermo about 100 miles closer to LA. They are famous for their curly fries, which indeed were very nice, but they also had delicious icecream (and the pies looked pretty good too but we didn’t try them). We enjoyed the icecream at the back watching some turtles sunbathing or trying to get up on some slippery rocks. The bathrooms in this place were interesting, the ladies bathroom having a statue of a man using a urinal.

We had lunch at a Taco Bell, then drove through Barstow and stopped at Bottle Tree Ranch

before reaching Victorville where we stopped at another Route 66 museum. The museum itself was interesting (had some Route 66 art painted on acrylic nails) but outside we felt watched, as there were quite a few homeless people.

And so we arrived in LA! We went through Cajun Pass first and realised how lucky we are in WA not to have the kind of traffic they have there.

Jacarandas in blossom welcomed us once we left the freeway and as we drove through San Bernardino, past another WigWam motel.

For the first night we stayed at Mission Inn hotel in Riverside. It is an interesting place. The lobby has large portraits of US presidents who’ve been through its doors. It is located next to a piazza with orange trees, it has lots of bells and other ship artefacts around, as well as two resident macaws (which we didn’t get to meet). We had a short evening stroll through the piazza with the San Gabriel mountains in the background, then a sit down in the Presidential Suite enjoying mocktails. After dinner we went for a walk around the hotel which turned out to be quite a labyrinth with lots of quirky, hidden interesting spaces.

A short video with today’s roads can be seen here.