This is Part IV of the posts for this trip. You really should read them in order, starting with Part I, here.
And you can get to the picture gallery for this trip here.
When I arrived in Twentynine Palms last night I booked a room online at one of the motels along the main drag, but something went wrong. Maybe I selected the wrong dates -- it was late, I was tired and, to be honest, a little stressed out about all the sand and rain -- or maybe, as has happened before, the reservations website altered the dates I selected. Anyway, after I made the reservation, I got a message from the website saying my reservation for the next night was confirmed, and any changes or cancellations had to be taken up with the hotel. (No contact information given, though; "Figure it out your own damned self," seemed to be their attitude.)
Not a problem, I thought, I'm going there anyway, I'll just have them change it from tomorrow night to tonight. Simple.
Problem: the office was closed. No one was in there. There was a night window around the side, with a bell and a phone. Rang the bell; no answer. Tried the phone; I could hear the phone ringing inside the office, but nobody came to answer it. Tried the bell again; still no answer. Tried the phone again; still no answer. Repeated Steps 1 and 2 several more times, with no success. At that point I just said the hell with it, and went back up the highway to another motel. (I should add that I was already a little pissed at the reservations website because it had failed me on the reservation in Globe the night before. That worked out alright, since the motel gave me an even better rate when I showed up with, apparently, no reservation.)
That "other motel" was a Motel 6. It's a mark of how pissed off I was that I went there. I had a very bad night in a Motel 6 about 35 or 40 years ago and have studiously avoided them ever since. But now, as seems to happen too often these days (damn it), I have to revise that opinion. Except for the arrangement of the parking lot and the noise of the fan in the bathroom, the place was pretty good: clean, comfortable and cheap.
I'm not proud about it, but my first instinct last night was to blow off the whole reservation thing and just claim that I'd shown up the next night -- tonight, that is -- and that there was nobody to check me in. Not my fault. (May actually be Not My Fault, but at this point it's academic.) This morning when I woke up I was still of that inclination. Checked out of my hotel, went for breakfast (Denny's again; nothing to report except the waitress looked remarkably like an aunt on my father's side, and she was upset that Denny's recently added prime rib omelettes to their menu but now they can't get prime rib) and then went questing for Arch Rock, which according to RoadTrippers was located about three blocks from the restaurant.
Actually, the location it led me to was the Visitors' Center for Joshua Tree National Park. The rock in question is located in the park, about eight miles down the road, and then 1.3 miles east, on foot. Having already seen a picture of what awaited me there, I decided that it could go on a-waiting, and I started for LA. Before I got out of Twentynine Palms, though, I had wrestled enough with my conscience about the hotel reservation, and so I pulled over at a parking lot, called the hotel, told them what had happened, and they cancelled my incorrect reservation. (The woman I spoke to wanted to know all about the night window non-response, so somebody might be in trouble there. Not my problem.)
The next place on my itinerary is an architecturally interesting house called the Desert Castle, and it appears that, when I was plugging in the next spot to Google Maps, my eye skipped over that one. A shame; the Desert Castle looks like something I'd actually want to see, as opposed to all these things that are just an excuse to pass a certain way. But it'll still be there next time I go through Twentynine Palms (which, since it lies on the route between Havasu and LA, will happen before too long). I've saved it to My Places on R/T, so maybe I'll remember to check next time I pass that way.
The point I actually put into the navigator was a scenic viewpoint. I'm going to take a shortcut here and just say this: I had a number of these scenic viewpoints set out on this section of the trip, mainly just to get the mapping app to take me along the route I wanted to drive, because I didn't want to just take the freeway to LA and the only way to make it guide me along the mountains was to plug in all these locations along the way. And they are all -- ALL -- closed. No reason given. Just a locked gate at the turn-off to each and a sign saying "Closed". Now, I didn't particularly care, but it would have been nice to know going in, since I passed up a number of good photo spots for Big Bear Lake in the expectation that the Lakeview Scenic Viewpoint would be the best spot available; and by the time I found out otherwise, I was past the lake.
I spent an hour and twenty minutes sitting in one spot, around noon today. Construction. One lane road. Pilot Car. I was getting a little miffed about it because, every now and then, a clump of traffic would come from up ahead; then, after a long pause, another; then another, and I'm thinking When do WE get a turn. Realised as I finally went through the construction zone that each clump represented people from a different subdivision that emptied into the road being resurfaced, and each of them had to get a turn.
Google Maps chose this as the day for a work stoppage. It's not speaking to me today. I noticed this first thing, when it did not tell me to take a Slight Right in a quarter mile on the way to Joshua Tree, but I didn't think anything of it until I was driving along from point A to point B in the mountains and suddenly and unexpectedly found myself on a freeway that I had worked very hard to avoid when putting in the waypoints. It seems that, at some point, it decided I didn't know what the f*** I wanted, and re-routed me along that freeway, and of course said nothing about it.
If you don't get the voice instructions you have to keep an eye on the screen, and, I'm sorry, that's really hard to do when you're driving in unfamiliar winding mountain roads with a lot of traffic. At one point I found myself in some really congested village, with my otherwise silent phone making a bonging tone over and over, and this little blue squiggle of a highway shifting around like every few feet it was rerouting me. (I finally realised that the bonging sound was a signal that the phone was charging; it kept going off because the mounting stalk doesn't seat tightly into the car's power socket, and every curve of the road was making it stop charging, then start again, and every time it'd start charging again, it'd make that noise to let me know. And as I'm writing this, I'm realising that it was rerouting me after every block because it wanted me to go back to the way point that I'd skipped and thought I'd deleted, because of yet another construction-related traffic jam.) At one point, I rebooted my phone, whereupon my Maps Lady said to me, "In a quarter mile, continue straight," and then fell silent again. (I have now uninstalled and reinstalled Google Maps; we'll see tomorrow if that fixed the problem.)
By coincidence, the audiobook I'm listening to now is about water in the West, and today's chapter was all about Los Angeles. I felt like I was taking a tour of places associated with the ruination of the Owens Valley. That cement plant I passed? That was built to provide materiel for the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
After a loooong drive along the San Gabriel Mountains, I got into LA around rush hour. Lucky for me, I was going in the opposite direction of 99% of the traffic, and other than a few slow blocks on Beverly Boulevard, had no trouble with the traffic. Saw some interesting parts of town coming in, too, particularly an area along Silver Lake Boulevard. Don't know what that part of town is called.
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| first sight of the city |
Now, here's a couple of not-quite-random thoughts:
(A) The middle-class-hotel business is increasingly operated by South Asian immigrants, so I'm coming into contact with them more and more often. How come so few of them ever smile? Is it a cultural thing for them, or is the business that stressful for them? And do they not understand the meaning their customers ascribe to their facial expressions? I'm thinking about this because of the stark contrast between the clerks, last night and this morning, at the Motel 6 in Twentynine Palms, and the Indian or Pakistani woman at my hotel in LA. Motel 6 made me feel welcome; the Beverly Inn would have preferred I stay somewhere else.
(B) Los Angeles is a remarkably diverse city. I wonder how long it will be before somebody starts a campaign to make us all think that naming parts of town things like "Korea Town" and "Little Armenia" are racist, and we suddenly have to call these neighbourhoods something else in order to be politically correct? Will that happen before or after Trump is convicted?
Okay, that last part actually was random.
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| tonight's near-brush with celebrity |
