Day Seven: Boron - Calico Ghost Town

We hit up the Super K for breakfast (surprise!) and enjoyed cereal for the first time in weeks. Slater informed me, however, that the milk was going to “curdle in my stomach” on the ride. It didn’t, for future reference. The road to Barstow was fairly flat but extremely windy, and the ride was uneventful. We did drop onto Route 66 for a few miles and even found a Starbucks. Thank God, because I have developed quite the bad habit of spending money on coffee, and I was becoming frustrated with the lack of caffeine along the journey. We sipped our heavenly goodness next to a man who felt compelled to recite Bible verses aloud to the entire Starbucks crowd, and we were honestly a bit creeped out by his incessant yelling in the center of a quiet shop, so we decided to head out.

While passing through the town of Barstow, we noticed a whole lot of heavily “medicated” folks and zero places to camp, so we continued about 10 miles further to Calico Ghost Town. We never really found out why it was called Calico Ghost Town, and quite frankly, we didn’t want to. You can’t blame us—we were sleeping outside. There was a KOA in town, so we checked in for a night and enjoyed a pool full of children under the age of 12 (whatever, we still had a pool). There was also a kind fella named Gunter, who came to California from Hamburg, Germany to venture on an RV road trip. He squatted next to our lawn chairs for quite some time to tell stories of his adventure, and tried during multiple occasions to speak German with me, but I quickly redirected the conversation to English after he stared at me confusedly and blinked his eyes.

It took us about an hour in total to decide on Top Ramen and bare hot dogs from the KOA store for dinner, and it was pretty horrible. The Pocket Rocket stove kept attempting to burn our tent down in the wind, and the hot dogs were room temperature at best after we spent a few minutes conversing with our friendly neighbors (who, by the way, were very insistent on providing me with a pink onsie to take with us on the trip). We retreated to the bed after laughing at our extremely unsatisfying diet.