Thursday Adventure Wrap-Up. Bakersfield.

Wildflower Travelog #5
Bakersfield, CA · Thu, 12 Mar 2026. 6pm.

It's 6pm and we're settled in for the evening at our hotel in Bakersfield, California. Yes, it's a move from where we stayed last night. Yes, it's not that far away if you look at the map below. Yes, we could have just stayed at the other hotel two nights and kept things marginally simpler. Yes, I hate Bakersfield because it's a shit-hole. But I wanted to try this hotel tonight because they have a hot tub. Except when we got down to the hot tub about 30 minutes ago, we found it was out of service.

I hate Bakersfield. It's a shit-hole.

Ah, but what did we do today? It was a flowers road trip!

We started the morning up in the Grapevine at 4,000'. We then made three stops/scenic drives for wildflowers, particularly the California poppy, which is at the height of its seasonal bloom right now. One was a bloom we spotted from the road west of the Poppy Reserve, the second was at the Antelope Valley Antelope California Poppy Reserve State Park, and the third was a very scenic dirt-road drive east of the park.

It's ironic that, of these three areas, the state park devoted to poppies was the least bloom-y. But that's part of the nature of wildflowers: it's unpredictable from season to season exactly how well they'll bloom in a specific area at a specific time. When we visited a few years ago we also found that an area just outside the park had superior blooms (2022). Though when we visited during the 2019 superbloom the best views were in the park.

After visiting three wildflower spots today we were wildflower-ed out. The next stop we made was an attempt at rock-hounding for Hawk. Alas the spot her online guides took us to is marked as private property with "No Trespassing" signs. We're not the sort of people to ignore such signs— we respect private property—so we called it a day. We then drove the scenic, back-roads route to Tehachapi for an early dinner.

After dinner we drove down the mountain to Bakersfield, which is where we are now.

ONE Good Thing about Bakersfield: Handel's Ice Cream

Wildflower Travelog #6
Bakersfield, CA · Thu, 12 Mar 2026. 8pm.

I groused in my blog earlier today about Bakersfield being a shit-hole. Actually every time I've stayed in Bakersfield I've groused about it being a shit-hole. For example, I used the term "shit-hole" during my last stay here a few years ago, during my previous stay a few months before that, three stays ago, etc. Basically you can just click the "Bakersfield" tag below and find a shit-history. But this evening we found one— one!— redeeming thing about Bakersfield: Handel's Ice Cream.

Handel's is apparently a southern California ice cream chain. There's one location here in Bakersfield. We found it this evening when Hawk was jonesing for ice cream and searched around to find something better than the usual suspects of Baskin Robbins, Cold Stone, and whatever Michoacana paleteries/neverias popped up on the map. Reviews on Yelp raved about Handel's home-made ice cream. It was on the far side of town but we had free time since the hotel's hot tub was out of service (whaddaya expect in a shit-hole town?).

We arrived at Handel's to find a large store that just makes ice cream. Like, there's no stupid espresso machine taking up space or employees' time. Just several rows of freezers. And lots of combinations of ice cream flavors you don't see at every other ice cream shop.

The portions were huge. While a single scoop at BR is now just that— literally one single scoop of ice cream— a small cone at Handel's is 3-4 scoops. Such generous servings aren't cheap... but they're also not way more than BR.

And Handel's ice cream was delicious. The flavor combinations were rich. Just the ice cream itself was thick and rich. You can tell they used full-fat milk and cream to make their ice cream.

Our ice cream high lasted long enough for us to almost get back to our hotel. We fell short by a few blocks when we stopped at a gas station around the corner. Then we remembered that we were back in a city where every part of town looks, smells, and sounds like the wrong side of the tracks.

Update: Oh, there's one other good thing about Bakersfield. Leaving.