Thanksgiving this year included a 2,575-mile road trip, 21 relatives, two states, eight motels and a wide array of restaurants, both great and not so great.
My wife Sarah and I left Watsonville on Highway 129 to Highway 152 in Gilroy for breakfast in Casa de Fruta.
It’s become a tradition for us to pay a visit to the roaming wild peacocks there and relish their blaze of incredible colors. We passed the San Luis Reservoir before reaching the San Joaquin Valley floor and Hwy 5 where we rolled south through thousands of acres of fruit and nut tree orchards, dairy farms and cotton fields.
An abandoned service station is complimented by a beat up truck in Lemon Cove. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
We often aim for small country roads in hopes of soaking in a flavor of the back country, wildlife and lakes and streams off the common path so that formula took us to Mendota. Along Hwy 180 we found the Mendota Wildlife Area. On their fading wood sign are the words: Acquired by the Wildlife Conservation Board, 1954. There are also No Trespassing signs in a lot that serves as a parking area for county trucks. No wildlife, no paths.
Nearby was the very small town of Tranquility, and tranquil it was. We learned that the agricultural town of just over 800 people gained notoriety when the 1970s TV show HeeHaw with Buck Owens filmed an episode there. Then we spotted a familiar name on a street sign, Tuttle Street.
Guthrie’s Alley Cat is an historical spot in Bakersfield. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
We continued east on Hwy 180 to Hwy 99 and then Hwy 198 toward Visalia and the small town of Lemon Cove in hopes of following back country roads into Bakersfield. A worn-down early-day pickup stood in the entrance to a dilapidated, weed-strewn Richfield service station that largely spoke for the tone of the area.
Then we climbed up the foothills along Rocky Hills Road near the town of Exeter. The twisty roads, sagging fences and sprawling views gave us a deeper sense of the lay of the geography, farmlands and small towns that dot the map. We spotted several red-tailed hawks and a blackheaded Phoebe, a member of the flycatcher family. We passed through the town of Lindsay, elevation 383 feet, and marveled at their ancient movie theater, originally built as the Glade theater that opened in 1924 with a movie screen and a pipe organ. A fire destroyed the building in 1933, but it was rebuilt and reopened as the Lindsay.
The Lindsay Theater has been standing for over 90 years in Lindsay, Ca. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
We checked into the Fairfield Inn in Bakersfield as evening fell in the city of just under 418,000 people in Kern County. For dinner we chose a familiar spot for us, Mama Roomba, afamily owned and operated Caribbean restaurant. The food was superb and the folks there were kind. We capped the evening at World Records, where we had tickets for the live music of Samantha Fish, a guitarist and singer-songwriter from Kansas City, Missouri. Her band and the warm up group were loud enough to be heard in surrounding states and probably Hawaii.
In the next part of this story we head to the desert and nearly get washed away in a rainstorm while getting there, and then aim for Tucson.
