Trust your instincts

Saturday 14th April 2012

We both finally had a good nights sleep last night. No rustling of biscuits at stupid o'clock this morning. We were pleasantly surprised by the motel's breakfast, which we were expecting to consist of stale doughnuts and bitter coffee, but was actually a variety of fresh pastries, muffins, toast and cereal. And nice coffee.

After eating as much free food as possible, we retraced our route slightly to visit Hearst Castle. This is a very grand mansion on top of a 1,600 ft hillside, built by William Randolph Hearst to entertain his celebrity friends in the 1930s. We weren't sure whether to go or not to start with, as it was $25 each, and we are a bit stingy. But we decided to leave it to fate to decide, by saying if there was space on the next tour when we got there, then we would go. There was plenty of space on the tour, despite all the scaremongering in the guidebook about booking tours in advance.
It turned out to be well worth it, partly because the house and grounds were a perfect mix of interesting and breathtakingly pretentious, and partly because there were loads of interesting birds in the grounds, and the tour guide identified the buzzard type birds we'd seen yesterday as Turkey Vultures. Which meant Claire was right as usual.
The house itself was probably even more over the top than a lot of English country mansions I have seen. I think it was because everything seemed a bit out of place, as there were so many styles borrowed from other times and countries. The same goes for the grounds, but we enjoyed spending time there a lot more than inside. Probably because it was sunny with amazing views and woodpeckers.

We came away a bit earlier than we would have liked, as we had quite a bit of driving to do. We drove south down the coast a bit further, with only a slight detour when I got us lost when left in charge of the map for a moment. We decided to cut through something called the National Forest on the map, which turned out to be a valley about 80 miles long, with rolling hills on either side, which gradually became snow capped mountains.
At the highest point, which was about 4,000 feet, the temperature had dropped, and the clouds had come down. Then, all of a sudden, we emerged into a huge desert plain and bright sunshine.
And that's where we've spent the rest of the day. The desert plain is enormous, and it took us hours to get across it.

We'd planned to look for accommodation near a town called Victorville. We've been struggling to find cheap rooms, and anything near Joshua Tree national park was extortionately expensive, probably because it's near to Los Angeles as well. Claire had done some research and come up with some possibilities, at a very reasonable $45 per room in Victorville.
When we turned up at the first possibility, the Economy Inn, we should have just trusted our instincts and walked away. The outside of the building was falling apart, and the reception desk was just a hatch with a grumpy woman who appeared when you rang a bell. Fortunately, we asked to see a room before parting with any cash. This revealed two things. One, that the grumpy woman was homophobic, and two, that the rooms were dirty, stank of smoke, and were grossly overpriced, especially as they were actually $55.
I was ready to leave town and drive on elsewhere, mainly because I'd been made to feel like something the grumpy woman had just scraped off her shoe. We persevered though, and managed to find somewhere with a nice receptionist and nice (albeit quite noisy) room. Not for $45 unfortunately.

Our final stop of the day was at another American Diner for dinner. We had a choice of two diners or a KFC near to our room. We intended to look at all of them before deciding, but as soon as we went in the first one, we were greeted by such a friendly, welcoming waitress that we decided to stay. Which turned out to be a good decision in my opinion, as the food was good, apart from the deep fried courgette. I'm not sure Claire agrees, as she says she feels like she's going to explode.

We're not sure how tomorrow will pan out. We have accommodation booked in Las Vegas, which is about 200 miles away. We also want to take a (big) detour through Joshua Tree national park. I'm not sure we will have much time to stop during the day.

One thing we must do tomorrow is remember the sunscreen. We have both got either sunburnt or windburnt faces with bad panda eyes from sunglasses We've spent most of the day driving with the roof down so it could be either.

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Location:California coast and desert