Day 21: Somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert

I hadn’t had enough of Los Angeles, but for­ward motion was crit­i­cal to my jour­ney if I was going to make Las Vegas by the end of the day, given the places I wanted to go first.

It was push­ing 100 degrees as I made my way toward Joshua Tree National Park, near 29 Palms and, not coin­ci­den­tally, Joshua Tree, California. I don’t mythol­o­gize Gram Parsons the way some do, but my des­ti­na­tion deter­mined my music playlist for the early after­noon, all Gram and Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, for hours and hours.

I spot­ted my first Joshua tree approach­ing Palm Springs, but strangely, I didn’t see any Joshua trees in Joshua Tree.

Joshua tree

I had a cou­ple dif­fer­ent restau­rants in Joshua Tree that I wanted to visit, but both were closed, appar­ently more breakfast-type places than all-day affairs. Sticking to my self-imposed “no chains” rule, I stopped at the Teacakes Bakery and got a scone and a peanut but­ter cookie.

I started dri­ving toward the national park, but I was run­ning out of patience for All Things Nature, so instead, I drove back west to catch the high­way up to Barstow. It turned out to be one of the more pleas­ant dri­ves on the trip.

My admi­ra­tion for Hunter S. Thompson is no secret, and I have the open­ing lines of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas tat­tooed in my brain, so I stopped out­side Barstow for a lit­tle while to read the first few chap­ters of the tat­tered 1971-edition paper­back I’d brought on the journey.

We were some­where around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remem­ber say­ing some­thing like “I feel a bit light­headed; maybe you should drive.…” And sud­denly there was a ter­ri­ble roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swoop­ing and screech­ing and div­ing around the car, which was going about a hun­dred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was scream­ing “Holy Jesus! What are these god­damn animals?”

Then it was quiet again. My attor­ney had taken his shirt off and was pour­ing beer on his chest, to facil­i­tate the tan­ning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he mut­tered, star­ing up at the sun with his eyes closed and cov­ered with wrap­around Spanish sun­glasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoul­der of the high­way. No point men­tion­ing those bats, I thought. The poor bas­tard will see them soon enough.

Not want­ing to kill too much time read­ing on the side of the road on a hot day, I lim­ited myself to the first 3 chap­ters before get­ting back to the road. I spot­ted a bill­board for a place I’d seen on TV in Baker, so I planned my din­ner stop at Mad Greek’s Diner in Baker, just a few miles down the road.

The Mad Greek

The bill­boards claim the Mad Greek offers the best gyros in the U.S.A., but those bill­boards are liars. It was aver­age at best. I had to ask for my Greek cof­fee twice before I got it, no thanks to the idiot work­ing the drive-thru win­dow. The trip to Baker wasn’t a total wash, though; I got to see the World’s Largest Thermometer!

World’s Largest Thermometer

The drive to Las Vegas is bor­ing, in the way long dri­ves through deserts and moun­tains can be, so I enter­tained myself by tak­ing pho­tos out the car window.

Driving through the desert

By the time I reached Las Vegas, the sun was already set­ting. I reached my hotel, the Stratosphere, promptly lost $20 before reach­ing the reg­is­tra­tion desk, dropped off my bags in my room, and spent the next eight hours in the casino, play­ing video slots, which mag­i­cally turned the $84 I had in my wal­let into 11 crisp $100 bills. It was almost 1:30AM when I started to get hun­gry again. I hadn’t really done my research, so I didn’t real­ize the myth­i­cal 24-hour buf­fets don’t exist in Sin City any­more, so my drive to the MGM Grand was mostly point­less, other than get­ting to see the Strip lit up with rel­a­tively lit­tle traf­fic on the road. I returned to the Stratosphere and had bis­cuits and gravy in the all-night place in the hotel, took the ele­va­tor up to my room, and tossed and turned for an hour before I was finally able to get to sleep.