August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part IV

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.

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.

tonight's near-brush with celebrity

August '21 Stained Glass Trip, Part 3

This is Part Three of this trip's blog posts. You can read Part 1 here. You can read Part 2 here. The photo album for this trip is here.

Arizona, where I started the day today, is on Pacific Time during the summer, since it doesn't concern itself with such social engineering schemes as Daylight Savings Time. So when I fall awake at 4AM -- that's 6AM back home, and my usual wake-up time -- I feel well-rested. I'm not, but I feel like I am, which is good enough for the present.

When I come out of my motel room I see that it's rained during the night, but the car is OK. No pool of water on the back seat, and nothing taken through the open windows. (I was worried about losing my liter-bottles of Diet Mountain Dew and my sun block; though I have lots of DMD, and with the top up, I don't really need the sun block.) My first objective for the day is, obviously, the Jaguar dealership in Scottsdale. Well, no, first is coffee, then breakfast, then Scottsdale. Google Maps claims it's 94 minutes away, and they're right, or right enough, about three fourths of the time. Plenty of time, so I load up and go on the hunt for coffee, easily found, and breakfast, also easily found. When I get back on the road, I have a cushion of maybe 20 minutes. I'm trying to wean myself off my obsessive dislike of being late, but it's a tough row. Twenty minutes' cushion is the best I can make myself do.

The Powers of the Universe decide to help me in that process, by sending me a backhoe with a top speed of fifteen mph, accompanied by a dump truck to keep the long tail accumulated by this little motorcade from even attempting to get around them on the narrow highway that winds west toward the big City. But at last, after about 20 minutes, they turn off. 

Coincidence? Or Providence? 

Traffic in Phoenix is as usual, meaning long stretches of very slow movement, but I do get where I'm going, and only a few minutes behind schedule. It's a building process, this move toward not giving a rat's ass about timeliness, like everybody else.

While I'm waiting for my car, I get a chance to reflect on one of my favourite topics: cars. Specifically, automotive design. More specifically, Jaguars. This place deals in both Jaguars and Land Rovers (both made by the same company). There are about a dozen Land Rovers in various models (all of which look the same to me) for sale on the lot. There are three Jaguars: one SUV and two convertibles, one of which is a used 2019 model. There are no XFs (the small sedan model), no XJs (the medium sedan), no XJLs (the large sedan). Maybe it's because of the pandemic; maybe it's a supply problem. Maybe the dealership can't keep them in stock. I think it's something else. I think it's because they don't sell.

Jaguars used to be sort of a slightly-more-affordable top-end brand. They succeeded when their cars were remarkably beautiful, and they had more success than most in coming up with beautiful designs: the XK-120, and its update, the XK-140; the E-Type (still the most beautiful mass-production car ever made), and the XJ sedans. They also threw out some visual clunkers, notably the XK-150 and the XJS, both last-minute model-line add-ons without the usual thought processes that resulted in the company's successes. When Ford bought the company, they came out with an almost-gorgeous model combining the old XK-series engine (updated, of course) with the E-Type's sexy lines (also updated): the XK-8. My car.

Almost as pretty: my Jaguar XK-8

It is not, I would claim, in the same design class as the E-Type or the XK-120. If I were a mechanic, I'd much rather have either of those models. But I'm just a guy who loves to drive and appreciates beauty in many forms; there's no way I could keep an E-Type's three carburetors in tune, and when it breaks down in western New Mexico, what the hell would I do about it? No point in taking it into a shop, there's nobody to work on those cars in most parts of the world. So I bought myself an XK-8. Almost as pretty as the E-Type, with modern features like anitlock brakes and 3-point seat belts and air bags; and new enough that it should be pretty reliable, still. And if it does break down, I can find somebody to fix it. I may have to drive 5 hours out of my way, but there are places out there. For me, it's the best combination of practicality, style and comfort. (And it has legroom and a trunk big enough to serve.) 

The new Jaguar line is not pretty. The sedans look ordinary, despite their overhyped "recessed" grille garbage. They're staid. They're meh. They're too expensive for most people who like them, and not expensive (or exclusive) enough for people who can afford them. They have no cachet. The new sport model, the F-Type, is commonplace. It looks like a cross between an undersized Camaro retread and a Mazda Miata, but with a deeper voice. There's basically nothing to recommend it to a purchaser with $100,000 to put towards a car-toy. If you want a car that small, you buy a Porsche or a Mercedes (or a Miata). 

So I think Jaguar is a failing marque, likely to go the way of the Hupmobile and the De Soto.

End of rant.

So they couldn't fix my car -- the parts would take days to come in, and I wasn't willing to wait. But they did get the back windows up (and then disconnected them so that I don't accidentally lower them again). It was around noon when I left the shop. Went across the highway to a restaurant to see what I could salvage of my planned excursion.

The beauty spots across Northern Arizona all had to go by the way: Point of Mountain, Military Sinkhole, Woods Canyon Vista and, most painfully, Mogollon Rim. And Tonto Natural Bridge, near Payson, was out. But the rest was still doable.

So I headed up past Wickenburg to see the Shrine of St. Joseph-of-the-Mountains, in a little town called Yarnell. I'm not big on things religious beyond the fact that some of them tend to be among the more beautiful architectural expressions of Western civilization. This wasn't likely to be that, but one never knows, does one. My reason for including it in the plan was that I have a good friend who is heavily into the rites of the Church of Rome, and so when I have the opportunity to visit such a place, I do so with him in mind, and maybe I pick up a little souvenir that he might appreciate. 

Well, the Shrine is "temporarily closed." No sign of when (or even if) it might re-open. But there appears to be some kind of construction-related activity contemplated. So maybe in the future.... And it wasn't a total loss, this cruise up the mountain: the road up there was a great drive, made even better by the fact that the travel lanes are separated by about 40 to 80 feet of altitude. The road winds up along the edge of a steep mountain, with views to the southeast across a wide valley. On the downhill run, there's a belvedere where I got some pictures of the view across the valley; but I need to stitch them together on my other computer. Someday, maybe in a couple of weeks, they'll be available for viewing.

I have a sort of gig lined up, contributing articles to a website called automotivemuseumguide.com. I intend to make my first submission about the Petersen Museum, one of the largest in the country. I already have a ticket purchased to see it (again; I was there in 2019) on Friday, but I thought it'd be a good idea to see if I could get somebody from the museum to meet with me then, to give me information to illuminate and edify my eventual article. Turns out, though, that it's Pebble Beach this week. That's one of the world's biggest antique-car shows, at a famous golf resort up the coast from LA; I reckon, for those Petersen people, it's either a buying trip, or a selling trip, or just a great perk of the job, and everyone's gone to that. But I got a couple of email contacts, which I will write to tomorrow, after I get to LA and check into my hotel.

Poston Monument

Meanwhile, I'm drivin', I'm drivin'. When I get to Parker, on the Colorado River, I almost decide to skip the next point on my itinerary, the Poston Monument, fifteen miles south of town. But it only added about 15 minutes to my trip, so I went on down the road to see it. It's a column marking the site of the largest of the Japanese-American Internment Camps during World War II. I'm glad I went to see it; it's a moving reminder of what this country did to loyal citizens in a time of panic, and I think the shame we all feel, or should feel, as Americans has gone a long way toward making us a better people.Or at least, to keep us from doing that again.

The border of the small plaza where the monument stands is lined with bricks giving the names and assigned dwellings of various internees of the camp; and on the back of the monument are the names of internees who gave their lives in the service of their nation during that same war, despite what that nation had done to them and their families. The bottom of the monument hosts a number of origami, mostly swans, which I assume are meant as reminders to the world and the former inmates of the camp that their suffering has not been forgotten. 

My First Sandstorm!

On leaving Poston, I caught my first-ever sandstorm. I could see it, off to the east, and by the time I'd gotten to my turn-off for California I'd had to pull over twice to wait for adequate visibility. It wasn't nearly as exciting as I thought it might be. The sandstorm continued as I headed west, but on that road I was mostly among irrigated fields, so the dust was only dangerously heavy in the interstices between fields, where the wind picked up dust and blew it across the road. I could always see six or seven telephone poles ahead, so I felt comfortable going on, though at reduced speed. (Plus that road had no shoulder to pull on to.) Once I crossed the river into California, though, there were no more telephone poles, so I had to slow way down. By then, though, the storm seemed to be waning, so I kept going. I thought about going back to Parker, but it was already 25 miles away, so I stopped for a time at the C-store at the turnoff for Twenty-Nine Palms and waited it out.

Between the C-store and Twenty-Nine Palms, I drove through my second and third sandstorms, with hard rain in the intervals. The sand was just drifting ahead of me on the road like wraiths. These sandstorms were lighter than the first, but it's a little disturbing when your automatic windshield wipers come on and throw off a load of powdery sand you didn't expect to have there. It was dark long before I got to my destination for the night, and I was tired, so I pulled over on a turnout (nice of them to put those in, and to let you know they're coming up) to just close my eyes for a couple of minutes. I often find that two or three minutes just sitting with eyes closed will perk me up enough for a sustained bout of driving. After, it turns out, about 20 minutes, a car passed me and woke me up, and I drove into Twenty-Nine Palms, where I am writing this. It's after Midnight, and I'm pretty wide awake. There's one thing in this area I want to see in the morning, then I'm heading over to Los Angeles on what I hope is a stunningly beautiful drive, but with the top up, as I can't put it down until I get the thing fixed after I get home. (I need two new high-pressure hydraulic hoses; both of them gave out, and I have hydraulic fluid sloshing around in the back of the car, between the trunk and the outer skin, according to the mechanic who worked on it. But at least my windows are up now.)