September 20, 2006: Should have had breakfast and filled up the petrol tanks at Needles - The Mojave Desert is quite unforgiving! Eventually, the convoy of five British Austin 7s and one American Austin, and their respective support cars, made it to a petrol station, literally in the middle of nowhere. Here the local establishment, which was the only occupied building for many miles and represented the town of Goffs (population of 23), sold a most excellent cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs and sold petrol at $4 per gallon.
The desert skies were clouded with ash from the recent wild fires in California and it gave the mountain ranges an eerie backdrop of a doomsday sky. Along the side of the road, which stretched out straight as far as the eye could see and over the horizon, fellow travelers had placed rock formations to spell messages. When in Rome…so a rock formation resembling “A7” now exists at Chambless, CA, beside Route 66. Reaching Amboy, now a ghost town, an old motel was being restored. In fact, the town of Amboy had just been bought for $400 K by a private entrepreneur and will hopefully be resurrected to its former glory of when Route 66 was a thriving highway. The temperature in Amboy was only 99oF since in the last 10 days the temperatures had dropped 20oF – guess we were lucky. A tea stop at Ludlow, another shriveled town, and onto Barstow for the night where the motel rooms sported round beds.
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