Route 66

The La Posada Hotel is one of the few sites left to see in the Needles area, which is your first city when entering California on Route 66. The hotel is the last Fred Harvey hotel that is still open to customers out of the historic Fred Harvey Hotel chain of restaurants and hotels.Since Needles, California is hot in the summer and mildly cold in the winter there are sports and other actives for families all year round. These include water skiing, boating, fishing, the Mojave National Preserve, the Mystic Maze, and the nearby Topock Gorge. Since there are not very many stops along the way through the Mojave Desert you might want to fill up before you take off.

The Ghost towns of the Mojave Desert are a treasure to see and there are many along the stretch of over 100 miles from Needles to Ludlow. Some folks don’t see these as a tourist attraction, but we find them to be some of the most interesting stops along the way.  Goffs, California will be the first ghost town that you see after leaving Needles. It has a General Store and a 1914 Schoolhouse that been renovated and is now a museum. Other than these two buildings this town really is a ghost town.Chambless, California is on down the road and used to have a gas station, a cafe and several cabins. The buildings are still there but are fenced in. Amboy is a town with 10 buildings and about 20 residents. In the towns heyday it was an oasis in the desert and everyone stopped at Roy’s Motel and Café. Sadly now there are no burgers served at Roy’s however the owner of Amboy has plans to restore a lot the town. Bagdad used to stand 6 miles west of Amboy along with other towns like Siberia and Klondike and are only names remembered. Very last you will reach the Ghost town of Ludlow, California that does show some signs of life as old Route 66 meets I40 again, but is not as active as it once was when the Mother Road was still thriving.The towns here have lost there population to larger nearby cities, lack of tourism and in some cases the mining towns ran out of ore to mine so there is simply no work.  No matter what happened to these cities there is a strange intrigue about them, it is not often that you can see a city with buildings still standing but there are no residents.  It makes you feel like you are in a movie almost.

photo credit: gamillos

Originally posted 2010-05-24 00:28:21. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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