The Bank of Oro Grande on the left, delapidated.
Cheap gas …
At Elmer's bottle tree ranch
4/14/18 Saturday: Victorville/Hesperia to Barstow. Another beautiful day. It took a few miles to cycle through Victorville, and towards the end I stopped at the California Route 66 Museum, which included a fair few items that made it across the Atlantic in my childhood. Only 2 further miles outside Victorville was Emma Jean’s Holland Burger Café, which I had read about and seemed mildly famous – so I stopped for a very early lunch and had a junior Holland Burger, which seemed to be hamburger and runny cheese in a toasted sourdough sandwich. Not worthy of being rated as immensely famous in my view. However, it transpired that the waiters and waitresses would do tricks on unsuspecting types (viz. me), and my waitress pointed a tomato ketchup squeeze bottle at me and squeezed: a stream of red shot out at me and I almost fell off the barstool backing up, only to realize that it was actually a bit of bendy red plastic. They got me. (The diner is also famous as the diner into which ‘the Bride’ a/k/a Uma Thurman staggers after escaping from her coffin after being buried alive in Kill Bill 2). After lunch, I cycled through some real old Route 66 towns, mostly somewhere between totally dead and fossilized – the Bank of Oro Grande had seen better days for example. In the early afternoon, I stopped at Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch and took some pictures – it was unusual to say the least. Just after Helendale, I went down a small hill and an opening on the left showed the train tracks only a few yards away. As I did so, the front cab of a freight train went past at my level and I waved at the conductor, getting a toot toot in reply. But it was hot in the desert, upper 80’s and 90’s, so I was looking forward to finding enough civilization to buy a cold drink – however, there wasn’t much until I got to the outskirts of Barstow where finally I stopped at a gas station and guzzled a large coke. I made it to my hotel in Barstow at about 4:45pm and after stopping in at a supermarket for provisions for the next day, went to an Italian restaurant within walking distance and had shrimp scampi and a small carafe of “Chainti”* as the menu had it, misspelt (no-one seemingly had ever pointed this out as my waitress kept saying “No, Chianti” until I showed her). Distance: 47.0 miles, elevation gain 1,231 ft, riding time 4:36.
[* Hey,
@Tony S , if you've never had yersel' some good ol' Barstow Chainti, you ain't never lived! It's a reeel eenofile's lip-smackin' wine ...]