The long road to the Lone Star State

In November my wife, Sarah, and I took a road trip to San Antonio, Texas. We packed on over 4,500 miles, averaging around 450 miles a day, stayed in 11 motels and wandered through four states.

While we were lucky to see many amazing things: the London Bridge in Arizona, the landscape around Tucson filled with saguaro cactus, museums, roadrunner birds and the skylines of San Antonio and El Paso. 

We were also stunned by the long list of shuttered towns, boarded up mom-and-pop shops, gas stations, the classic five and dime stores called Kress, movie theaters, railway stations and even an opera house. 

These are places long shut down, dust covered, with smashed in windows and so empty it felt the ghosts even packed it up and moved on with only a couple tumbleweeds and jackrabbits roaming the lonely streets.

We headed south from Watsonville through Pajaro and caught San Miguel Canyon Road to Hwy 101. In Paso Robles we swung east on Hwy 46 after a lunch of grilled chicken and a chicken burrito at a roadside string of shops right off the freeway. We drove through miles of rolling hills blanketed with vineyards, and then were rerouted around a fatal big rig vs. car crash. Our detour gave us a view of unfamiliar agricultural lands, miles of almond and pistachio orchards, before we met up with Highway 5 south toward Bakersfield. Similar to trips through this area in the past, we passed hundreds of acres of uprooted dead almond trees on both sides of the highway.

Highway 5 took us into Bakersfield at sunset where we had a room at the Hampton Inn. We walked a short distance, under Highway 99 to the Buck Owens Crystal Palace, a music hall mecca created by the country/western music giant who is from that area. 

Since Sarah lived her high school days in that area, she is a Bakersfield High School Oiler. Over the years, we’ve developed a list of favorites around town, like the Crystal Palace, the Padre Hotel and Dewar’s Candy Shop, which opened in 1909. 

Our evening at the Crystal Palace included a steak dinner and live music by The Buckaroos, a group that included members of the original Buckaroos. They were incredible. We made several attempts at joining the line dancing and were appreciative of the other dancers’ tolerance for newcomers to the genre. Even though I wasn’t drinking, I must have come across as a drunken idiot in trying to keep up with the dancers. Their version of “The Streets of Bakersfield” certainly set the right tone for our evening.

In the morning, after enjoying a waffle breakfast at our hotel, we drove south on Hwy 99, then onto Hwy 5 up the Grapevine to Hwy 60 and east to Riverside. Here, we visited the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which features a huge exhibition and study of Chicano art from across the U.S. 

Then we drove east to another favorite spot, Desert Hot Springs. We dropped anchor here for two nights to enjoy the hotel’s numerous pools filled with natural running hot water and the bounty of desert beauty.

In the next part of this series, we explore the desert, dine in Palm Springs and continue east to Tucson to see family and more desert.