Day 4: Kingman, AZ to Santa Barbara, CA

Today is a very happy day. After leaving Kingman, we head off towards the "ghost" town of Oatman, in the middle of the most cowboy-esque mountains ever! Now this is what I wanted to see in the Southwest - a perfect combination of mountains, desert, plant life, abandoned mines, car wrecks and, most importantly, fauna.

It's not really a ghost town at all - its main street is certainly more bustling than most of the anonymous towns along our trail. But it does still have all the authentic wooden houses, slatted, covered sidewalks and, um, feral donkeys you could want from the Wild West. Sarah and I both went ultra-tourist, waving our cameras around willy-nilly, although neither of us bought any of the sumptuous range of wolfshirts on sale.

We also came face to face with the world's biggest insect. This is a picture of it actual size. Fear it! As well as that, we saw what we both have chosen to believe was a gila monster, a snake (that sadly lasted slightly under 2 seconds before it veered under the wheels of the Subaru. That sucked.) and a saguaro cactus! Sarah kept warning me that we weren't really going far enough south to find them, but lo and behold, next to a broken-down homestead with scary "keep out" notices, there was a 20-foot cactus, looking for all the world like cactuses are meant to, and it even had a little hole in its trunk with wee birds flying in and out!

Sarah: We're surrounded by buttes!
Mark: Yes, it's a butte-fest!!

Apart from my inimitable sense of hilarity, today was a good day for roadside ephemera. Pylons shaped like saguaros, Joshua trees, ham-fisted anti-smoking billboards (a young black kid puffing away under the words "It's like I'm cool - AS COOL AS A FOOL!"). A wonderful sign instructs boat-owners how to behave considerately, featuring a stick man falling off a boat shouting "yikes!". We are, I should remind you, in the middle of the desert at this point.

There are also a large number of crude wooden crosses by the side of the road. It's something we see all over the southwest, but more on the little barren stretches of Route 66 than anywhere else. It's strange and not a little poignant.

We are welcomed to California via the city of Needles, which would make a better name for a 1930s Bronx gangster, but hey. We could tell it was California because of all the palm trees. I'm not 100% sure what the appeal of palm trees is - a long, featureless trunk with a bushy bit on top which does little other than drop coconuts on one's head, cartoon style (NB, this didn't happen to either of us. BUT IT COULD HAVE).

The remainder of southern California was split into two halves. The first was the let's-hope-we-make-it-across-the-desert trip over the Mojave, where I experienced the hottest temperature of my young life. 108 degrees fahrenheit! Now that's just silly. But it was pretty special, in a harsh, flat, majesty of nature kinda way, surrounded by joshua trees, red red sand and heat haze. Marvellous.

And then, reality bites back. We decided to bypass the city of angels by going north of those mountains above LA, the name of which I've forgotten. It's traffic-ridden, irritating, narrow, smoggy - everything we've so enjoyed escaping for the last three days. Sarah gets tense and nervy by our proximity to huge blocks of concrete whizzing by at 70 mph, and things aren't made any happier by our getting lost in the nothingness of Santa Clarita.

But we make it, eventually, to Santa Barbara, the fulcrum of our trip. We're greeted with joy, beer and Sexy Hair products by ex-pat Ben and his lovely missus Rachel. Our hostess, Jess, arrives after an hour or so and is immediately lovely and funny and welcoming. Hurrah for people! Tomorrow is our first rest day; we're staying here two nights and enjoying a rather slower, less hectic, tiring experience. Wine tasting to look forward to. Num...

Posted by biondino at June 26, 2003 12:32 PM