Day 3: EL MIRAGE to SALTON SEA

In a windswept desert city, just north of Adelanto Airport, a 25-foot statue of Quan Yin, said to have miraculous healing powers, looms over Highway 395.
Every week, hundreds of Buddhists from all over Southern California congregate here, at the 15-acre Buddhist Meditation Center. At this remote temple, still under construction, people come to pray at this statue of Quan Yin, a bodhisattva, or “enlightened one,” who is associated with compassion and mercy.

Peggy Sue’s is an original roadside Diner, built in 1954 with 9 counter stools and 3 booths. Set in the shadow of the Calico Mountains, it was built from railroad ties and mortar from the nearby Union Pacific Rail yard.

From Peggy Sue:

“Champ and I came from Southern California in 1981, reopened the diner in 1987 and attempted to restore and preserve it in its original state. Before moving to the desert in 1981 Champ worked for Knott’s Berry farm and I worked in the movies. The diner was the perfect place to display our extensive collection of movie and TV memorabilia.
We decided to expand the Diner into a real Old Fashioned Tourist Stop, just like we remembered when we traveled across country as kids. We opened a 50’s style 5 & Dime Store with Curios and Memorabilia, Soda Fountain, Ice Cream Parlor, and Pizza Parlor. We even created or own Dinosaur Park with larger than life Dinosaur Sculptures, Waterfalls, Fountains, Ponds, Grass and Trees for our guests to take a stroll. “

As you drive along Interstate 15 heading towards Las Vegas, you’ll pass by Baker and their 134 foot thermometer. Built in 1991 by a local resident named Will Herron, and weighing in at 76,812 pounds, the thermometer is 134 feet in height because that is the highest temperature (in Fahrenheit) ever recorded in the United States, on July 10th, 1913 in Death Valley.

Owner and founder Ken Bannister has been collecting bananabilia since 1972. The museum – the largest in the world devoted to a single fruit (as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records) – has 17,000 items on display, including a petrified banana and Tammy Faye Baker’s degree in Bananerology.http://www.bananaclub.com/InsideMuseum.htm

Victorville, California - Route 66 Museum -  Scale Model of Hulaville ($125)

The Route 66 Museum in Victorville includes a scale model of Hulaville, as well as the original Hula girl on display.

Hulaville, also known as Mahan’s Half Acre, was the creation of Miles Mahan, a sunburned folk art fixture on the shoulder of I-15 in Hesperia, until his death in 1996.

Miles was a career guess-your-weight man with a carnival before retiring to this small patch of roadside real estate in 1954. A year later, Miles came upon the Hula Girl, a billboard which had recently been discarded by a Hawaiian restaurant. He brought the Hula Girl home, placed her on display, and Hulaville grew up around her.

After Mahan’s death, his attraction was dismantled. The Route 66 Museum in Victorville is the new home of the Hula Girl, as well as a scale miniature version of the Mahan’s Half Acre.

Made of chicken wire, steel rods, and concrete, these artifacts are losing their battle with the elements, and are beginning to deteriorate.

The final resting place of the King of the Cowboys and the Queen of the West.

Toyota Speedway at Irwindale features banked, paved 1/2 and 1/3 mile oval tracks. Opened in 1999, as Irwindale Speedway, Toyota purchased the naming rights to the facility in 2008.  Irwindale hosts races for just about everything with wheels: Stock Cars, Sprint Cars, Midgets, Supermodifieds, Legends, Trucks, and more.

In 2003, in cooperation with local law enforcement, Irwindale Speedway opened its 1/8 mile dragstrip to local competitors, and hosts legal drag races for street legal cars, trucks, and motorcycles. The dragstrip is proud to extinguish the “nowhere else to go” excuse used by illegal street racers, and local police often hand out flyers to offenders for free entry into drag races at the dragstrip to promote safe racing.

Irwindale Speedway is also listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the location for the fastest-ever top speed of a remote-controlled car. Cliff Lett of Associated Electrics, set the record of 111 mph. Lett, one of the designers and developers of the RC10, set the record with a heavily modified Associated RC10L3 touring car on January 13, 2001.

http://www.toyotaspeedwayatirwindale.com/index.asp

Rialto, CA – Wigwam No. 7 ($40)

Most recently parodied in Pixar’s movie, Cars, as the Cozy Cone Motel the Wigwam Motel in Rialto, Rialto hosts one of seven Wigwam Motels originally built. Two of the last three remaining rest along historic Route 66 in the states of Arizona and California, while the other rests in Redford’s home state of Kentucky.

Originally designed by Frank Redford in 1933 near Horse City, Kentucky, #7 was the last in the series. Frank built this one for himself in 1947-49. There is a central building, and two rows of wigwams. The motel’s nineteen 30-foot-tall wigwams are made from wood framing, concrete and stucco.
http://www.wigwammotel.com/

It is now the headquarters for the Juan Pollo fast food chain. Albert Okura, founder of Juan Pollo, bought this property in a foreclosure sale. He knew its history, and has turned part of it into a McDonald’s Museum.

This medical school museum houses a collection of fetuses and models illustrating various stages of development. In the early days of the museum, mutants in jars were used to scare young mothers into giving up smoking and drinking (the school was started by Seventh Day Adventists). The Alfred Shryock Museum of Embryology continues to be popular with medical students and visiting school groups.

This display of muffler art includes Paul Bunyan, a giant rooster, and the head of the Statue of Liberty, a bucking horse, and a plane.

The Time Bandit, a 1/3-scale replica of a 17th-century English three-masted galleon, is now sailing the waters of Big Bear Lake.

The ship, built by a father and son team over the course of ten years, was used as a prop in numerous music videos, and Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film Time Bandits (from which it took its name). Formerly berthed at the San Diego Maritime Museum, it has been re-launched in Big Bear Lake as tourist attraction and cruise boat.

Repeatedly un-shod by locals (whether by the Sierra Club to protect the tree from the weight of the shoes, or by locals to maintain the tree’s history as a “hanging tree” is unclear), this tree seems to continuously sprout new footwear.

Dedicated in 1951 to “Peace on Earth and the Brotherhood of Man,” Desert Christ Park contains more than forty snow-white statues and images portraying scenes of Christ’s life and teachings.

Created by artist-sculptor Antone Martine, the statues are made of steel-reinforced concrete, range from life-size to over twelve feet in height, and weigh up to sixteen tons each.

http://www.desertchristpark.org/

Pioneertown was built in 1946 as a permanent movie set for western movies, including the movies of Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, with Duncan Renaldo, Annie Oakley with Gail Davis, Judge Roy Bean with Edgar Buchanan, Range Rider with Jock O. Mahoney, and Buffalo Bill Jr. with Dick Jones. The movie set was to provide a place for the actors to live, and have their homes used as part of a movie set.  Some of the original investors in the town were Roy Rogers, who also built the Pioneer Bowl; Sons of the Pioneers, which the town was named after; Dick Curtis, who was a professional villain in old movies; Bud Abbott; Russell Hayden, who played Lucky on the Hopalong Cassidy series; Louella Parsons the Hollywood gossip columnist; and Philip N. Krasne: The Man Who Saved Pioneertown.

The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.

http://integratron.com/Welcome.html

In Amboy, California, a tamarisk tree east of Roy’s on Route 66 is used as Shoe Tree. One of the largest shoe trees in the world, Amboy offers multiple low-hanging branches and easy road access, allowing passers-by to add to the pop culture monument without leaving their car. Simply roll down the window and slowly toss your footwear.

Gary Koppenhaver is owner of G&R Mufflers in Lake Elsinore, where the colony of aluminum-painted sculptures includes a golfer, a musician, and two women with big hair and earrings. Assisted by his co-sculptor “Turp,” he builds new figures whenever work slows down, and inspiration strikes.Gary explains that the best parts for building his figures come from the Honda and Toyota exhaust systems, as they are both smaller and more varied than American muffler components. Gary builds a new character only when he the idea for a new personality seems to fit with the other members of his cast in the yard.

www.motorsportscenter.com

Cabazon features two giant dinosaurs, built by Claude Bell, who ran the Wheel Inn on I-10. Dinny, a giant Apatosaurus and arguably the largest dinosaur in America, took 10 years to create. A small museum in Dinny’s belly still sells souvenirs. Claude’s subsequent project, a giant Tyrannosaurus, was nearing completion when Claude died in ‘89.

New owner Gary Kanter, an Orange County developer, is using the dinosaurs of Cabazon as a platform for his Creationist viewpoint. Working with Pastor Robert Darwin Chiles, they are transforming the Cabazon Dinosaurs “from tourist stop to place of worship,” according to a story by Ashley Powers in the Los Angeles Times.

www.cabazondinosaurs.com

San Gorgonio Pass is one of the windiest places on earth. Cool coastal air is forced through the pass and mixes with the hot desert air, making the San Gorgonio Pass one of only three ideal places in California for steady, wind-generated electricity. (Wind turbine generators require average wind speeds of at least 13 mph.)

The more than 4,000 windmills on these twelve square miles of land  have a capacity of 619 MW and an annual generation of about 893 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity, energy for about 100,000 homes. Though an impressive site, it is actually the smallest of the three major wind arrays in California (others are at Tehachapi Pass and Altamont).

The San Gorgonio wind resource, together with Tehachapi Pass and Altamont Pass, account for nearly 95 percent of all commercial wind power generation in California, and approximately 11 percent of the world’s wind-generated electricity. In 2004, wind energy in California produced 4,258 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, about 1.5 percent of the state’s total electricity.

Engineered in cooperation with NASA, the largest of these windmills stands 150 feet tall, with blades half the legend of a football field. The compartments at the top containing the generator, hub and gearbox weigh 30,000 to 45,000 pounds. A wind turbine’s cost can range upwards to $300,000 and can produce 300 kilowatts an hour – the amount of electricity used by a typical household in a month.

This giant VW Bug Spider lives in front of the “Hole in the Wall Welding” shop in Palm Springs. Similar to other car spiders spotted in Arizona and Nevada, the Palm Springs Spider has some nice hair details in the legs not seen elsewhere.

The National Date Festival takes place in Indio, California, and originated in 1921, when the sweet fruit was not only a major crop but also a tourist attraction. When the event was revived in the ’30s, it served as the Riverside County Fair, and took on an Arabian theme. It’s been an annual event since just after World War II, and is known around the globe for its quirky attractions such as the Camel Races and Queen Scheherazade and her Court. The opening ceremony includes the blessing of the dates and the Arabian Nights Musical Pageant.

www.datefest.org

The Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge is located 40 miles north of the Mexican border at the southern end of the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial Valley. Situated along the Pacific Flyway, the Refuge is the only one of its kind, located 227 feet below sea level. Because of its southern latitude, elevation, and location in the Sonoran Desert, the Refuge experiences some of the highest temperatures in the nation.

Established as a sanctuary and breeding ground for birds and wild animals in 1930, the Refuge was renamed In 1998 after Congressman Sonny Bono, who took an active role in trying to save the Salton Sea. Originally, it included approximately 37,600 acres; 60 percent of which was an open saline lake, with the remainder comprised of shoreline alkali flats, freshwater wetlands, native desert scrub, and farm fields. Due to the inflow of agricultural effluent and a subsequent rise in the level of the Salton Sea, all of the original Refuge area has been inundated. At present, only about 2,200 manageable acres remain suitable for farming and wetland development.

http://www.fws.gov/saltonsea/

http://www.saltonsea.ca.gov/histchron.htm