| I thought there might be a crowd at Mimi's for breakfast, but there was not. Mimi's is just next door to the Howard Johnson hotel in Anaheim. I had looked at the menu before going out there and found that they had a stuffed French toast breakfast. It was stuffed with cream cheese and marmalade and covered in strawberries and blueberries. Mmm. I had already eaten one of the four when I decided to take a picture of the food. |
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| This stretch of Route 66 isn't all that scenic. |
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| *DUPLICATE PHOTO WARNING* Just to prove where we were. We took Route 66 out to... |
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| ...Calico. It was a mining town, then a ghost town and now it is a county park for tourists. Walter Knott, the Knotts Berry Farm guy, bought the town a while back and rebuilt some of the old buildings from old photographs to look like how it would have back in the boom days. |
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| Read a little about Calico. |
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| The hills and mountains in this part of the desert go in all directions. If I remember correctly it is a fairly volcanic area, so rock is being pushed around in all directions. This is in a small nearby canyon. |
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| This is the main drag. |
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| The restaurant and fire hall. Not original buildings. |
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| There's an old Wells Fargo safe. It was just there in one of the buildings. |
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| This is the Lane House. Lucy Bell Lane was the last inhabitant of Calico. This is one of the few original buildings left in town. |
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| Ms. Lane's stove and dresser. I don't know if that dour looking woman in the photo is Lucy. It could be. |
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| The general store is another of the original structures. I noticed that the old buildings were made of adobe brick and the reconstruction was in wood. |
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| A peacock was hanging around in front of one of the buildings. I wouldn't think peacocks were native to the California desert. Must be a tourist. |
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| More of the reconstructed town. Most of the buildings are now souvenir shops and the like. |
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| Calico, starring Christina Pickles as the housewife and Jeffrey Tambor as the dentist. Starts Friday at a theatre near you. |
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| The building is marked "drug store", but it's also says "Lil's Saloon". Whatever it is, it is one of the old original buildings. |
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| This is what the town looks like now. |
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| This is what the town looked like then. Obviously this old photo must have been in the early days before some of the other buildings had been constructed. I can see what looks like the buildings that are the general store and the drug store. Or not. |
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| I suppose you would call this uptown Calico. |
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| At the end of town is this recreated church. |
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| There's gold in them thar hills! Er, actually silver. And I suppose it's mostly all gone now. |
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| It costs a dollar to go down into some of the old mine shaft. It was worth it just to get out from under the blazing sun and 100°+ heat. |
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| Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's down the mine we go. |
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| The sign says "This is Deadman's Drift. Dark rock is silver ore." Of course with the dim lighting, it all looks dark. |
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| A lumberjack in the mine? Preposterous! |
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| Some of the hills into which the mines were dug and below which the town was built. |
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| Little makeshift buildings built into the side of the hills. |
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| I took a picture through the windows on the right of the previous photo of the train that runs around the mine area of town. |
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| It's kind of cheesy, but these two guys to a gunfight show several times a day. But the kids seem to like it. |
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| We had seen on one of the morning news programs when they did the weather a beautiful place called Big Bear Lake. It wasn't far away and kind of on the way back to Anaheim, so we took the trip through the desert and up into the San Bernardino mountains to find this oasis. |
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| The lake is up in those mountains in the distance. |
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| I realized I had not taken a picture of our rental vehicle. I reserved a full size car and they bumped us up to a small SUV. It's a Hyundai Santa Fe. |
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| Some of the attractions at Paradise Pier in DCA after dark. We would go back to the parks again on Monday. |
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