It was time to leave Los Angeles and fill up the tank too! Being in the USA you can’t expect to fill the tank first and pay later, right? This level of trust doesn’t exist there! You have to pay first, even if you don’t have any clue how much you are going to spend. You must tell to the cashier how many litres of fuel you want to buy beforehand! Because of this reason, I ended up using cash to fill the tank thereafter, as refund can be quite slow.
Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas takes around 4 hours. Not that much, although there isn’t much either to see between the two cities, or at least this is what you would think. We instead planned the whole day to visit some interesting spots.
The California 66 route museum would have been the first stop, but unluckily it was closed that day, so the first stop turned out to be the Peggy Sue’s 50’s diner, right in the middle of the desert!
What a fantastic place! I really wanted to experience a 50s diner and this one didn’t disappoint. The food is decent, but the top is the atmosphere inside, let the photos speak for me:
Connie, the waitress, tells us that she worked there since she was young. It’s incredible to imagine she spent her life in the middle of desert, like many others after all.
The place has a souvenir shop, to testify the fact that now it’s more a touristic attraction than a diner and it doesn’t lack surprises, like the life size statue of a man inside the ladies toilet that scared the sh*t out of my wife! 🙂
while Peggy Sue’s was charming, the next stop waiting for us is mind blowing! Spoiler alert: it was goddamn hot! So hot that for the first time during the travel (and many more times after that) we realised that the cowboy hat wasn’t invented for cosmetic purposes, but to save yourself from a sunstroke! NEVER go during the summer in the desert without a hat and litres of water! You don’t have any idea about how much water we bought. In fact, we bought so much water, that we are not proud of it at all. The wisest thing to do, is to buy an ice box and the largest jug of water possible (5 litres should be common) and refill the same bottle over and over, instead to buy dozens of dozens of bottles of water.
After just few minutes from Peggy Sue’s, Calico Ghost Town was totally unexpected, much bigger and well presented than we thought. Calico Ghost Town was the largest silver mine between 1881 and 1896 and the exactly what you would expect from a western based movie town!
among the various activities and venues (including restaurant), there is an original mine that is still possible to visit for few dollars
After around 1 hour it was way too hot to stay, so hot that we didn’t care about anything else than the air con inside the car. Time to go!
Last stop right before Las Vegas was the Pioneer Saloon.
Now, if you wish to support the local business, please go. The place is so isolated that only few tourists go, however the detour is some miles and you may just want to go straight to your hotel in Las Vegas. Up to you! Welcome to Nevada!
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