On the Way to Phoenix

Getting from Oakland to Phoenix took one-and-a-half days. We were really clipping along until we hit L.A. and the Chinese food.

We stopped at some place off the 57, not quite clear of L.A. traffic, and the only food we could find was the Chopstick House in this huge mall in San Dimas. Not bad, and the service was very kitschy (you know, rude in kind of a cool way). We scarfed our fortune cookies and got out on the road again.

Ruth had a lot of energy until the pouring rain and thumbing hailstones gave us hard going on the I-10. We still made pretty good time.

We got into Indio and looked for the Worldmark resort. Couldn't find it. We had to consult three different sets of directions/maps to pin it down. Once we found it, checking in was easy, and the place was very nice. However, it was 9 o'clock, and no restaurants were in sight, so I'm glad we ate Chinese earlier that evening. We were exhausted.

We got up by alarm at 6 am because we knew we had at least four hours in front of us. We had breakfast a little down the road, at a place called Chiriaco Summit. There was a little eatery there, right next to a gas station. It seems that Chiriaco Summit was founded by Joe Chiriaco in 1933. He had come out west in 1927 to see Alabama play Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and ended up staying. He obviously loved the desert, as Chiriaco is nowhere near Pasadena. The same day he opened his general store and gas station along the old road, the new two-lane blacktop to U.S. 60 also opened. He married Ruth, a beautiful nurse from Minnesota, and they faced long days of dispensing gasoline and selling goods, all without air conditioning.

During WWII, General Patton established the Desert Training Center right next door. Patton thought the desert there would suffice as proper training grounds for Africa. Today the museum commemorates that event. However, all we could see was the armored tanks behind the fence. The blacktop was being resurfaced, and we could only imagine what was in the museum, as it was closed.

We pulled into a little town called Quartzsite after that. No, I'm not misspelling it. It had a line of junk shops along the highway, some of which looked terribly temporary. One place advertised that it got its junk from things left behind by airline travelers, like scissors. We dropped some Georges there, hoping someone, sometime would log into Where's George. I guess that's a wild shot, though.

Ruth loved the wildlife along the road. And she would point longingly at Joshua Tree park, just to the left of us. Me, I just kept driving, driving, driving.

We got to Phoenix five hours later and went straight to the ballpark. After all, Ruth is a what's-along-the-journey person; I'm an arrivals person.