🚙 Newsletter #6: The 5 weirdest places we took our kids on our road trip
From Palm Springs to Salt Lake City, the 5 most interesting spots we hit on our roadtrip
Hey it’s newsletter #6! I honestly thought I’d peter out around newsletter #2. But here we are. I’m starting to fall into a pattern with the newsletters. On tuesdays (ish) I will share a story of some kind. Maybe something about some dumb shit my dad or brothers did. Or a story about parenting. Whatever. And on fridays (ish) I’ll share a story from our roadtrip. Advice on traveling with kids, where we went, what we did, how we managed it, etc. It’ll likely link back to my website where I’m writing all this stuff down. Sound good? Great, moving on.
I wrote in Newsletter #4 our philosophy on dragging our kids to unusual places. If you did not read that newsletter, it is ok, I will distill it thusly: we drag our kids to unusual places.
So, with that being said, the 5 most unusual places we took our kids on our roadtrip:
5. The Madonna Inn (San Luis Obispo)
Tell anyone you’re headed to SLO (as the locals call it) and the first thing they will tell you is “go to the Madonna Inn and get the cake”. Not named for the singer Madonna, the Inn is like if Liberace puked pink leather, flowers, and chandeliers all over a space the size of a mall. It is best known for its pink champagne cake. Megan attempted to reverse engineer the recipe at home and concluded that each slice of cake contained approximately 1,000 calories. We instantly became less enamored with this delicious cake. The girls, beneficiaries of similar metabolisms to hummingbirds, thought the cake was fantastic
4. Great Salt Lake (Salt Lake City)
Sometimes you arrive at a place and have an overwhelming feeling that everything around there is fuckin dead man. That was the Great Salt Lake. Located about 30 minutes outside of Salt Lake City, I half expected to be greeted by a more robust state park. Instead I came to a small little hut that took the $5 admission fee cash only (I did not have cash and pointed at the girls and said “do you really want to deny these sweet faces the Great Salt Lake?” they let me in). The lake is giant, incredibly still, and surrounded by chapped and dry sale lake beds. The girls took ample time to just stare into the void of the lake. No playgrounds. No sand to play in. Just a salty ass lake.
3. Gilgal Sculpture Garden
It should come as no surprise that Salt Lake City has two entries on this list. The whole town has a weird energy. Maybe the weird energy comes when you spend more than 2 weeks without a decent beer as I did b/c, well, Utah? Or maybe it comes from the 60+% Mormon population, folks who like to give the impression of a squeaky clean image but embrace a light oddball streak (my Mormon folks know what I’m talking about)? I dunno, but SLC has something going on. And for us it began at Gilgal, a sculpture garden where the most prominent piece is a sphinx that pays homage to Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS church. More pics and a better description of Gilgal can be found here.
2. Salton Sea / Bombay Beach
The first time we were in Palm Springs, some friends of ours from San Diego came to visit. We were sitting around and I was describing some of the weird shit we’d taken the girls to. Our friend Chris said without hesitation “oh, well then you have to take them to Bombay Beach”. And maaaaan was this place weird. Bombay Beach sits on the edge of Salton Sea, not really a sea but not really a lake either. Salton Sea more accurately resembles that enormous puddle that sits on the back edge of your property, collecting water but not draining because it has no where to go. It grows a little more foul and funky as time goes on. That’s the Salton Sea. Sitting at -226’ feet below sea level (among the lowest in the US), the entire area is basically deserted. Except for Bombay Beach. A former resort to the stars in the 50s and 60s, Bombay Beach has been taken over by artists, weirdos, and others coming and going. There’s a collection of public art exhibits on the beach, a drive in with abandoned cars, and the Bombay Beach Opera House decorated with flips flops hung on every inch of the wall and a piano made out of cardboard (don’t believe me? read on). We brought the girls’ scooters to zip around the “town” (a collection of dilapidated and abandoned houses with the occasional resident in one of them) but when a few stray dogs appeared, it was time to pack up and go home. (for more pics see the Salton Sea section here)
1. Robolights
When I started writing this list, I knew the #1 slot immediately. Robolights sits on a few acres right in the middle of the toniest part of Palm Springs (the artist / owner is the son of a famous hotelier in Palm Springs). The artist, Kenny Irwin, has collected trash, random electronics, toilets, and more random Santa Claus’ than I could count and combined these random artifacts to form the art installation known as Robolights. I think the girls could have spent a week there climbing, crawling, and nearly destroying various art pieces. I will be fair that there are some pieces that skew more heavily towards skeletons and other scary shit so if your kids are prone to the spookies, you might want to skip this one. Please please please see the pics on my website because they are awesome.