More Route 66 Pictures! Part II: Leaving Victorville

Upon leaving Victorville, the highway that used to be known as US 66 (and still is known by that in our hearts) is National Old Trails Highway.  This next series of pictures is what you encounter upon leaving Victorville, heading north into Barstow.

Upon leaving Victorville on 11/30/11, I stopped off at the side of the road to take this shot looking back.

And here's what it looks like looking north, which is Route 66 East.  From this point it looks like I'm in for a beautiful day.  Photo taken 11/30/11.

OK, now let's fast forward to 7/16/13.  Same road, different day.  It turns that this is the first abandoned gas station one sees on the road to Barstow, and not the one that I mentioned on my first posting.  We'll get to that one in a later post.  This is an abandoned Mohawk station, at the intersection of 66 and Mill Street.

Here's another view of the Mohawk station.  This photo, and all photos of the Mohawk station that follow this were taken on 7/16/13.

A closeup of the gas pumps themselves.  With the price accommodating $1+ per gallon pricing, this station had to have been in commission in the second half of 1979.  If you look closely at the sign in the background, you'll see that we are in Oro Grande.

While we were there, Burlington Northern Santa Fe made their presence known.

One more shot of the gas pumps.  I have no idea when this one closed, but you can judge from the brush growth that it wasn't recent.  At one time this had to have been a solid business, but when I-15 opened between Victorville and Barstow there wasn't any reason for anyone to use this road any more.  Thus, we have one of several casualties of progress.

Here we have a closeup of the Mohawk Mini-Mart, which is next to the gas pumps.  I'll have to do some research on the Mohawk gasoline brand to learn more about this.  I'm not sure, but I think it was a chain.

This is going to be it for this evening.  Stay tuned.......more photos are on the way.

Some Route 66 Pictures! Part I, Victorville CA

OK, I'm going to start posting Route 66 pictures.  I can't do this all in one post so what I'm going to do is start off with a Part I, which will be photos taken in Victorville CA.  The photos you see here were all taken on 11/30/11.  Also, the captions are below the pictures.

If you wish to see "larger" pictures, there's a way to do that.  You'll have to single click on them, whereupon you'll see a larger picture with this neat black background.  You'll have to click on the X in the upper right in order to get back to this blog.

This is 7th Street once signed as US 66, looking west.

The same street, but looking east, in my direction of travel towards Needles.

This shot is in the historic district, looking back (east).

Here I'm not too far from the left turn, which will place me on National Trails Highway, with the next major town being Barstow.  At this point I'm really excited about what lies ahead!

One last look back.  This is what you would see upon entering Victorville, if you were taking 66 from Barstow.


More pictures are coming, which will include those taken on 7/16/13.

I Really Should Post More Often.....

Greetings to all homo and hetero sapiens out there.  One thing I really wanted to do here this year was to post more often.  I started this "money" series that I need to write more often on, I need to post some Route 66 pictures from my two trips there, I need to comment more often on the headlines, and it probably wouldn't hurt to write some personal reflections on some other things. 

As it is, I seem to spend a lot of time "taking care of life", for lack of a better term, and my job has me putting in overtime from time to time, and I've seen some of that.  My employer does pay me straight time for the OT, which is a plus since I'm salaried, but to be honest I think I would rather have a normal schedule.  But the problem there is that I happen to enjoy my current assignment very much and I have no desire at this time to pursue other opportunities.  That's a good thing.

In case anyone was wondering, I am spending a lot of time with Sheila and less time on the hobbies I was enjoying before I met her.  I tell myself that I need to pick up the guitar and finish some songwriting projects that I started a year ago.  I need to catch up on some reading (I'm currently working on the LBJ biography series by Robert Caro.....I highly recommend it!), and there's season number five of the classic Hawaii Five-O DVDs (I often watch these episodes with Sheila).  And of course, I spend time with my two devoted cats, and due to this thing I call "cattus interruptus", I sometimes don't get much done in my leisure time.   That too is a good thing; it's their job to slow me down and make me pet them whenever they want my lap, which is very often.

One thing I've been doing is trying to get the house caught up to where I want it.  It's something that I resolved to do two years ago and it still isn't where I want it to be.  The good news is that there's a new spa heater, the back door to the patio has been fixed, a new patio carpet was put in earlier this year, I've built some shelving, and a contractor is coming over on Friday to replace some aging shower doors.  After that I want to get a new stove and a new dishwasher, and I'm also thinking about a deep freeze unit and stocking that up with meat from Costco (I'm really going to need that freezer if I ever get off my sitting end and bag a deer).  And in addition to that, I'm thinking about becoming active in ham radio again, and getting that dipole antenna up on the roof. 

Oh, did I say that I want to get my coin collection better organized?  I work on that from time to time.  Over the years I have collected lots of foreign coins, and although I am working on filling vinyl pages with them.  There are also lots of US coins in the collection, and I'm working on searching a box of pennies that I picked up the last time I was on the east coast (there is a rare die variety on the "P" cents, and coins from Philly are hard to come by in the Grand Canyon State). 

When I think of all the things I want to do, I sometimes suffer from this dread of retirement.  I mean, if I have my way, I'm going to be in the workforce for several more years, but when I retire I'm thinking that I just might be as busy then as I am now.  That's a good thing too, as that there are lots of horror stories about aerospace engineers kicking the bucket not long after retiring, and I sometimes think it's because they have nothing to do with themselves once they stop working, and somehow that kills them.  I have no way of knowing if I'm right on that.  Me, I'll have plenty to do, though I see myself as spending a year on the highways of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada before getting a part time job.  I'm not sure if I'll bag groceries at Safeway or if I'll return to my present employer as a part time consultant.  I'm also not sure if I'll stay in Tucson when I retire.

Arizona does have a lot of retirees, and from what I know a great many of them are escapees from California.  A good friend of mine from San Jose is right now in Prescott Valley and I think he picked a damn good place to retire.  I was originally thinking I would end up in the White Mountains somewhere, as that I want to be somewhere where there's plenty of hiking, hunting and fishing.  The White Mountains strike me as such a place, but so does Prescott.  And, I'll admit that I'm intrigued about the prospect of retiring in Ely, Nevada.  I've never been there but I'm thinking of making a scouting run up there, but if I want Nevada then maybe I should consider Pahrump.  Las Vegas is out....don't get me wrong, Vegas has plenty to offer in terms of entertainment and I could spend lots of time people watching on Fremont Street, but Clark County is northeast Southern California and the real estate market there has been dicey.  I won't make a lot of equity living in Ely but Ely doesn't have the big city problems that I seem to be reading more and more about here in Tucson.

Well Sheila has just arrived, and so I'm going to sign.  Moe and Larry are in the process of welcoming her (and of course they'll get plenty of pets from her) but I need to take over from them when they're done.

Don't forget to pet a dog or a cat.