Day 17. Mile 4350. Mojave, CA.

I took some time in the morning to wander around Seligman. Although this town has the name of a Jewish lawyer, its character is very different.

Three or four buses were parked along the main street, and the French tourists that they brought were swarming the souvenir shops. I managed to find a shop that was relatively quiet and that also served breakfast, and after eating I went back on the road.

I drove taking very few stops, going back and forth between the I-40 and route 66, until I reached Mojave. The first thing that you notice once you enter Mojave is the insane amount of wind turbines. The second thing that you notice is that the town looks like it gave up, with many of the stores on the main street deserted.

I drove the truck into the parking of the “Best Motel” and asked the shy Chinese guy at the reception desk where I can find the best motel in town. When he was done being confused he gave me a room. I walked around the depressing town for a while.

Then I went to get dinner. There are very few place to get dinner in Mojave. I stepped into El Jefe Baja Grill. Once again, I was the only costumer in the place. The waiter was a tough, Hispanic young man. So tough, he had tattoos on his eyelids. Yes, I’m being totally serious. Tattoos. On his fucking eyelids!

Being the tough kid that he was, and being a waiter in a shitty restaurant in a shitty town, did not prevent this young man to act as if he is working in the fanciest restaurant in Paris, standing tall and contiguously calling me “Sir”. I had dinner and quite a few beers there as I was watching “Chopped” on the big TV. 

Then my phone started buzzing as it was receiving emails and it would not stop. The drama was unfolding in Boston, as the police were hunting down the two bombers, and I was getting  a lot of information in real-time through the Media Lab’s mailing lists, and when I say “real-time”, I mean less than a minute: the Media Lab is only a few minutes walk from where the police officer was shot, and in addition, some people were already listening to the MIT police’s scanner and posting on the mailing list information seconds after hearing it. Some people were actually stuck in the lab since the entire Boston area was locked down. Some of the emails were discussing where to find food in the lab in order to pull through the night. I wanted to point out to them that they can always resort to eating silk worms that  were brought recently the lab’s lobby (yeah, the lab does weird things, like putting silk worms in the lobby), but I decided to wait with jokes until everything calms down. I finished my Carne Asada and my beer, and went back the the motel to get some sleep before the road-trip’s last day.

Day 16. Mile 4000. Seligman, AZ

Before leaving Grants, I walked around to take some pictures.

It was only then that I slowly started to put together the pieces of the story of Route 66. In short, it is one of the first roads in the US highway system that connected Chicago in the east to LA in the west. It was a very significant road until the I-40 opened, which resulted in the near obsolescence of Route 66. These days the route is experiencing some renewed recognition, and being declared as a “scenic drive” by some states in which it passes.

Grants’s main street is a small portion of Route 66, which explains the large number of motels, along with the terrible condition that they’re in, like this abandoned one:

When I was done in Grants I started driving out of New Mexico and into Arizona. There were a lot of signs at the sides of the roads advertising Indian souvenir shops, and all theses signs looked the same. I stopped for lunch at a gas station owned by the Hopi. When I got back to my truck I noticed that I parked it with all the big boys, and that it looks kinda ridiculous:

Driving some more, I saw a sign directing to the “Meteor Crater”. I had to check it out. Turns out it’s a crater created by a meteor some 50,000 years ago. It’s very hard to get it all in a picture, so here’s the best I could do:

I drove on the I-40 some more, and stopped at Seligman. I know, it sounds like a law firm and not like a town, but it is - another one that has Route 66 as its main street, but this one seemed to make a big deal out of it:

 I got a room and the Romney Motel. The manager asked me where I’m from. I said I’m coming from Boston.

- “No, where are you originally from?”

- “Israel. Why? Where are you from?”

- “Israel! well, not me, but all my family lives in Bat-Yam”.

Bat Yam is a shitty city, just a little bit south of Tel-Aviv, which was really surprising and definitely amusing. His wife passed away a while ago and his only son lives with his own famiy in Las Vegas, so this gentleman was saving money for his retirement, which is coming very soon, so he can move to Israel to live with his extended family in fucking Bat-Yam. 

I went to get dinner at “The Roadkill”.

To my right, took place the most manly conversation I ever heard. Four guys were sitting at the bar, wearing working clothes, baseball caps, and they all had rough, dirty hands, with black stains underneath the fingernails.  One guy was talking about the deer he was hunting, and how it’s too expensive now to take them to the butcher. I couldn’t understand him fully because of his thick accent, but I assume he said something like “so now I have to cut them up myself” or “so now I stick my bare teeth in them and eat them alive”.

By the time I gave up parsing what he said, he was talking about a 2-inch, externally-threaded, em, something, and then the other guy said “oh, that’s what we used when we replace the motor of that old truck.” I was praying that they won’t turn to me all of the sudden and say “hey, stranger, what do you do for a living?”

Then I went to the only open bar in town, the Black Cat bar, where I had a couple of beers, nodded “goodnight” to the couple at the pool table, who were the only patrons besides me, and went to bed.