Route 66 - Day Eight - Santa Monica to El Centro, CA

Our bad karma from the day before was momentarily stayed by a trip to Snug Harbor, a local diner, for breakfast. Friendly service and great food! They make a mean omelette (I had one with jack cheese and turkey chili. YUM!).

When we were done paying, Ivan & I realized we both were left with $1 to each of our names.

I stopped in at the Whole Foods Market next door to try to find Nik some hickory smoked salt, which I'd been looking for since Texas. No such luck.

We headed to the end of Route 66: Santa Monica and Ocean Blvds, and found both the marker and the (other) 'Route 66 ends' sign. Even though we were both crabby, we shook hands and got a pic. Hooray! Thus endeth the trip out.

Now, the trip back. More bad karma: Ivan found a parking ticket on the car when we walked back.

We headed to Sunset Blvd to drive and see some homes. Then we got on to Mulholland for a bit towards the Pacific, and saw more nice homes. We had lunch at a nice (albeit expensive) sushi resto on the Sunset Strip. We kept driving, caught a glimpse of the Hollywood sign, and headed out of town towards Yuma.

(note that the above narrative does not include the 90 minutes plus of bad navigation on my part, or the fact that Iv still wasn't feeling well due to the bad food at the Beaver St. Brewery back in Flagstaff. I'll stick to the positives)

Once we got out of town, the destination was San Bernardino for the unofficial McDonald's museum, located on the site of the original McDonald's. Great museum, albeit a big disorganized. It has a lot of old McDonald's toys, memorabilia, etc. that you may or may not remember from your youth. Here's a vid I shot in there:



We aimed for Yuma, but settled in El Centro: a hub town for SE California, with a lot of franchise restaurants. This was the first time for a while we got into a town early enough to feel like we had an advantage in finding a motel, especially since there were so many here, and most of them had a lot of vacancies. The Superstar Motel was the choice, mainly because we were superstars. And also because it was $45 and clean.

But no internet. Blargh!