Day 36 Route 66

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve had some problems with timing our stops. Today’s third stop was for lunch so I didn’t want to get on the road too soon after breakfast because I knew Dave wouldn’t stop too early for lunch. So I talked him into installing the new Segway seat. Of course the battery has been discharging while sitting back there on it’s hitch mount, so now it needed to be plugged in awhile before I could test the seat. By then we were both antsy to get on the road so the seat didn’t get much of a test. We’ll have to do that sometime when we are parked for a day or two. Now, at 11:40 a.m. we need to get back on Route 66 and see how long today’s events take.

On the way to our first stop I saw a Stanley Steemer truck advertising air duct cleaning. Back in Minneapolis, Stanley Steemer was our carpet cleaning company. Maybe here, where there’s not all that winter muck to clean up, they need something else to do.

In Monrovia, California, we stopped at the Aztec Hotel. Interesting decor, huh?  It’s called pre-Columbian and it was built in 1925.

Then we tried to stop in Arcadia, California, for pictures of the Santa Anita Racetrack’s 1930s architecture but there are few places it is possible to stop and none of them are good ones so you have to settle for these pictures until you can go see it for yourselves.

 

Then we drove down Colorado Boulevard singing the few words we could remember of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”

In South Pasadena, we ate lunch at the Fair Oaks Pharmacy. This old fashioned drug store still has a “classic” soda fountain and what I’ve always known as “ice cream tables and chairs.” The food was good but the staff was very disorganized. A one hour parking limit should be enough for lunch, right? It wasn’t but we didn’t get a ticket. Also, note that they still sell the item in the second sign. I haven’t seen such a thing since I was a young bride back in the 1960s.

 

Here’s LA’s version of a muffler man type statue:  chicken boy.

3:30 p.m. appears to be the wrong time of day for sightseeing in LA. Traffic is thick and slow. But, maybe there is no right time of day here?

We drove by the Formosa Cafe but there was no place to stop except blocking driveways or red curbs and we’ve already been waved on by one traffic control officer today. Their sign was backlit by the sun so it wouldn’t photograph well anyway. I’d like to have gone inside to see some of the photos of famous people but it really was getting late so we kept heading towards the beach.

Dave stuck his head out the side window along the way to get this picture of the Hollywood sign. We’ll have to came back someday to get a better one.

We skipped the Peterson Automotive Museum.  If we’re lucky they’ll still be showing “From Autocamps to Airstreams: The Early Road to Vacationland” next time we are in town.  It would be a perfect ending to a Route 66 tour, don’t you think?

The ocean turned out to be a lot further down Santa Monica Boulevard than I expected and with all that traffic the sun set just before we got there so this pictue through the car window was the best I could do today. Palisades Park and the Santa Monica Pier will also have to wait for another day. They aren’t officially part of Route 66, they just seemed like a perfect place to end this trip.

It was full dark by the time we pulled into Malibu Beach RV Park so we said a mountain view instead of an ocean view would be fine. It’s not like we could see either one anyway. Tomorrow is another day but for now we are done traveling Route 66. I hope you enjoyed our trip.

The end.

TTYL,

Linda