Out of the Mojave River. Lunch in Yermo.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #20
Yermo, CA - Mon, 26 Dec 2022, 2pm

Today is shaping up to be as much about the driving as the hiking. But that's okay because the driving is purposefully scenic. The old Native American prayer, In Beauty I Walk, doesn't mean literally walking. It means journeying, as in the journey through life. Sometimes that journey is behind the wheel.

We finished up driving the Mojave Road through Afton Canyon by exiting at Basin Road, about 8 miles east of where we entered. The canyon, with its steep, colorful walls, had petered out by that point anyway. There were no more amazing side canyons like Spooky Canyon or the way nicer unnamed canyon. But it's still interesting to drive through a river. Here's a quick video:

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Once back on dry, paved land we headed back toward Barstow, not to call it a day yet but merely to get lunch closer to town before heading back out across the desert. We ate at EddieWorld in Yermo. Yes, it's a bit tourist-trappy, but their food's pretty good and they have the biggest selection of stuffed animals I've ever seen under one roof. We bought a pizza, a chicken fingers basket, a couple of drinks, and a couple of sheep.

Up next: we'll head out east again to drive/hike at Pisgah Crater.

Getting our Kicks on Route 66

5 Days in the Desert travelog #21
Newberry Springs, CA - Mon, 26 Dec 2022, 3pm

After lunch we crossed down from the I-15 corridor to the I-40 corridor, heading out to Pisgah Crater. Rather than cruise along I-40 with the truckers we opted to drive Route 66. The two roads run parallel in this area, sometimes lbarely 50 feet apart.

Route 66 is in some ways even more sedate than I-40. The road isn't as flat, and the speed limit is lower, but it's even less crowded than the already pretty calm I-40. In fact Route 66 is so uncrowded that we were able to stop in the road to take pictures!



What's the fuss about Route 66? It became part of American culture in the mid 20th century. The road, built in the 1920s, connected Chicago to Los Angeles. It factored into people migrating west during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era; it was name-checked in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. From 1945 through the 1960s it came to represent post-war optimism and the American freedom of mobility, where one could just pack a few bags and drive 2,500 miles away without papers or plans to start a new life.

Today Route 66 is an artifact of a bygone era, a thing still worshiped by aging Baby Boomers but little more than a curiosity to younger generations. The road's use was overtaken starting in the late 1960s with the built-out of the interstate highway system in the US. It was officially decommissioned in 1985. By then businesses that flourished with travelers in early decades were already drying up. The classic Pixar movie Cars tells this story.

BTW, no, Newberry Springs, near where we took this picture, is not the pattern for Cars's fictional setting of Radiator Springs. The movie's setting is explicitly in Arizona; and the red-rocks landscape reflects that. Plus, Newberry Springs is way tinier than Radiator Springs. It's basically two gas stations on I-40.

Pisgah Crater

5 Days in the Desert travelog #22
Pisgah, CA - Mon, 26 Dec 2022, 5pm

We drove Route 66 east, including stopping for a classic Route 66 picture along the way, to Pisgah Crater. Visiting Pisgah Crater was ironically one of the things we planned this trip around. That's ironic because we've wound up doing various other things the past few days and only got here this afternoon.



It's further ironic because as we approached Pisgah Crater we realized it's a fucking gravel pit. The volcanic cinder cone has been mined for decades for cinder and gravel. The road up the sde of the cone (yes, there's a road all the way up) is marked "private property" and "no trespassing". We met two other explorers chilling at the base of the mountain and asked them where to go. They recommended we simply ignore the hand-painted private property signs as the mine owner has been essentially bankrupt for decades.

Geologically this crater isn't as interesting as Amboy Crater, which we visited two days earlier. Amboy is unspoiled by mining operations. Amboy also shows multiple concentric rings inside the crater from a series of eruptions. OTOH, Pisgah has a variety of lava tubes and caves. We explored around for a bit on the BLM lands and found only a collapsed lava tube plus a few small caves.

5 Days in the Desert, 5 Nights in the Hampton Inn

5 Days in the Desert travelog #23
Barstow, CA - Tue, 27 Dec 2022, 8pm

I mentioned at the start of this 5 Days in the Desert trip that we'd be "motel camping". That's meant 5 nights at the Hampton Inn in Barstow. It's a comfortable midscale hotel. Most Hamptons usually are. And we bought this stay on points, including a 5th-night-free bonus. Gotta use those gobs of Hilton Honors points I earn somehow!

One of many things I like about Hiltons is the digital key system. You can check in to your room via the app and get a digital room key, all without ever having to visit the front desk. The digital key allows you to unlock the door from your app when you're standing within a few feet of it.



Other hotel chains have a similar feature. Marriott does, for example. But Marriott's sucked last time I tried using it 3 months ago. It could only open the room door, not the building's outside doors. And there was no way to get Hawk a digital key. So we both had physical keys (well, plastic key-cards) because Marriott's digital key is still just a toy. With Hilton the digital key can open the building, not just the room, and it has a smooth feature for sharing the key among roommates.

I first learned about the sharing feature when traveling with a friend a few months ago. I was skeptical at first, but he already knew the sharing thing worked and showed me. I became a convert when it saw that it worked. This trip Hawk was the skeptical one. I showed her, and she became a convert once she saw it worked, too.

The digital key hasn't been all smooth sailing, though. Although it's worked flawlessly on my past few Hilton trips I've had several failures this trip. The other night when the app said there was an error retrieving the key. Last night my app got stuck "requesting" the key for 12 hours. Tonight both Hawk and I got "You've been logged out" from the app & had it wait for it to log us back in. I don't know if these errors are due to something at the property level or a recent buggy update in the app.