I can’t actually remember when I first read about Route 66 and decided this was a journey I wanted to take.
I’d always had a spirit for adventure and organised my own trips from 1999 onwards. I guess seeing the world was my ultimate dream. My parents had never been outside of the UK but I couldn’t limit myself in this way.
When I was twenty one I took a second job in a pub, working behind the bar, in order to squirrel away money to pay for my excursions abroad.
When I had my own children I wanted them to experience the world with me and took them abroad for the first time when my son was three and my daughter was eighteen months old, on my own!
When hubby and I reunited after 30+ years I found a kindred spirit, someone who also wanted to explore with me and when we first sat down together back in the Autumn of 2015 listing places we would like to go I added Route 66. The idea of driving across America, through eight different states, on a road that pioneers had once driven really appealed to me.
We had originally agreed to do it as our honeymoon in 2020 but Covid put paid to both the wedding plans and subsequent honeymoon. It then got postponed to 2021 but again Covid said no!
When we eventually married in 2022, knowing that the trip would need an overhaul, I felt it was too much to take on whilst also organising a whole weekend wedding in another part of England so we went island hopping in Greece instead.
As we are both celebrating a big birthday this year it seemed like a good idea to bring it back onto the table. As I suspected some of our previously planned accommodation, excursions and meals out at traditional Route 66 establishments were curtailed as they hadn’t survived covid.
When we first left Chicago neither of us really knew what to expect but we welcomed leaving the big city behind and heading out into the countryside of Illinois. Surrounded by fields of corn and soya beans we enjoyed the solitude.
The Route 66 navigation app by Marian Pavel and Jan Svrcek Sr plus the EZ66 book by Jerry McClanahan became our constant travel companions as we traversed this huge continent.
We had no idea, at this stage, that every state would be vehemently different and the greenery and crops we were experiencing at the start would slowly slide into a hot, desert landscape before hitting the outskirts of LA and the end of our journey along the “Mother Road”.
We didn’t know who we would meet, the places we would find or the memories we would make. Where do you begin to summarise this road of dreams?
Weirdly I’m starting at the end with a memory that will no doubt stay with me forever.
On our penultimate day we left our accommodation in Las Vegas, following a one week detour, and drove 108 miles, 1 hr 45 minutes south to rejoin Route 66 just north of Needles entering the hamlet of Goffs.
We had learnt on our journey across the USA that the descriptions of populace is different to the UK. Everywhere is a city or occasionally a town in America regardless of size whereas in the UK we are accustomed to a hamlet, village, town and city based upon populous. Goffs was nearly a ghost town.
From Goffs to our motel in Pasadena, where we planned to spend our last night on the journey, was 263 miles and 6 hrs 45 mins away. We planned to stop for a late breakfast en route and also looked forward to Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch just outside Oreo Grande. What we hadn’t planned for was the landscape of the Mojave Desert.
Excuse the pun but it was desolate. A landscape of arid, harsh conditions. What habitation we did see challenged our thinking. Why on earth were these people out here, in the middle of nowhere, with no real food shops, the odd petrol station and just miles of scrubby desert between them and the next signs of life?
They were living not just in solitude but often in what looked like poverty. We saw some nicely built bungalows where somehow land had been taken back from the desert, irrigated and green bushes and the odd tree had found a way to grow.
Then there were large mobile homes sometimes in sets of two, three or four where maybe an extended family lived close together, moving down the spectrum we saw trailer park style homes standing alone and then ramshackle mobile homes and wooden properties that looked like they were falling down around the occupants. We even saw a tent with a bicycle dropped outside on the desert floor just before we turned right and meandered into Ludlow where we stopped for our brunch. I couldn’t decide if this was a fellow Route 66 traveller or some complete lunatic. You surely would have been able to catch the drops of condensation inside the tent in a saucepan!
Cars, boats, RV’s and school buses had been abandoned on properties as if the land was so worthless that it was easier just to leave the automotives to decay amongst the wilderness.
We spent up to an hour at a time alone in this wilderness. Oddly, being British and unaccustomed to this climate, we were never afraid or concerned, we just revelled in the solitude. Route 66 had given us many lonely roads and quiet moments on our trip and this was the climax.
We hadn’t expected to see the two Chinese statues outside of Amboy. Why were they there? We were going to pull over and take a couple of photos but I wasn’t prepared to venture into the landscape where rattlesnakes liked to bathe in the heat of the sun!
The desert had an odd haunted quality to it and made me think about the people who had travelled west nearly a hundred years before, moving at maybe 20 miles an hour. What on earth did they think when they found themselves amongst this desolation? They would already of been on the road for probably several months and just as they could reach out and touch Los Angeles at the end of their journey they were faced with this: the heat, lack of water and facilities must have in itself been a real challenge. We were happily driving across in our air conditioned car with cold drinks tucked behind the seats!
When we finally reached Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch and pulled off the highway we found it devoid of human life. Elmer had lived out here with his family and when he was young would go out into the desert and collect odd bottles with his Dad. When his Dad died and left Elmer his huge bottle collection, Elmer decided to make trees on which he could hang these bottles.
He fashioned metal stakes which he drove into the ground and somehow stabilised in the sandy terrain so he could place more metal spikes at various angles, springing out of the original central metal stem to resemble a tree. He then added more spokes to these branches so he could hang bottles on them. He then took great thought as to what he could place on top, a bit like a Christmas fairy. These ornaments from his vast collection included a bicycle, a set of typewriters and even a rifle.
Elmer unfortunately passed away on June 22 2019 at the age of 72 after a short battle with extremely aggressive lung cancer. Elmer was an inspiration to us all. Most importantly, those who met him talk fondly of how warm, friendly, and kind-hearted he was.
His son Ellsworth Hayes described him as: “A bad-ass Marine, husband, father of 3 boys, and of course, the ‘bottle tree man’ … He was my best friend. And it brings tears to my eyes knowing there are people out there like yourself dedicated to the love of his bottle trees.”
Using materials that would normally be discarded, with desert land as his canvas, he created a destination that attracted visitors from all over the world and garnered international media attention–amazing!
This was one of my favourite stops on Route 66 because it epitomised the individualism of the people we had met en route and all my photos on this post are from the ranch. My Instagram account contains a video I took out in the desert.
I really wish Elmer was still alive so I could have met him. I’m sure he was a great character. All credit to his son for allowing us travellers to stop by despite no one being on site. A couple of people stopped while we were there and were in n out in seconds obviously not understanding why Elmer created the ranch.
This is art in its most imaginative form, what an inspiration Elmer must have been. It’s lovely to know people show respect and take their photos leaving nothing behind except their thoughts.
When you leave Elmer’s patch of beauty behind you soon reach Victorville and the outskirts of Los Angeles and suddenly the journey feels like it is over. It feels like all the memories we have made together are left behind in those hundreds of bottles on Elmer’s ranch and civilisation has once again taken over.
I’m happy to share more of those memories of things we saw and people we met in future posts but for now I’m waving goodbye, with a tear in my eye to this dream that I’ve managed to deliver.
A Midlife Adventure 