Mark and I agreed to meet at the Wal-Mart in Los Banos on Friday night. I’d arrived a little early to find accommodations for the evening. And when I say “a little”, that’s exactly what I mean. It took me over three hours to drive that 115 or so miles, thanks to traffic jams everywhere on 101, and then again across the Pacheco Pass.

 

Maybe my fatigued state was the thing which made the Sunstar (Sunspot? Sunstroke?) Inn look relatively benign. Either way, it looked better than most of the other motels along Pacheco Boulevard. There’s no Motel 6 in Los Banos.

Anyway, I figured it would be OK for one night and it pretty much was, despite the fact that it had been remodeled about 1989 and was apparently last cleaned about the same time. Apparently missed in this renovation was a cool lampshade from the late 1960s, which we both craved and pondered stealing. The place had full cable, although the TV picture was disturbingly green. And there was heat. And a bed, which was an absolute requirement for Mark’s first round of motel sex ever.

We met at 7:30 and spent just long enough in the Wal-Mart to buy an extra pillow. Then we went back to the room and befouled the bedspread. It had been almost two weeks, after all. Squishy sex, shower, and time for dinner.

We drove around Los Banos looking for food and, upon realizing that nothing but Burger King seemed to be open, we ended up in Santa Nella. There, we found a Denny’s. A good Denny’s. Not one of those stupid Denny’s Diner nightmares, nor even one of the ones renovated in subtle and noring pastels. This was a semi-original, albeit with some new paint and chairs, and it even featured the cartoon-style logo.

It was good. And so was the, ummm, creative way we burned off our calories afterward.

Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep too well. I think it was the heater I’d been so excited about earlier in the evening. It made me stuffy and made my mouth feel like sandpaper. I was a little draggy all day. Didn’t affect our morning farewell to the Sunblock (Sundried?) Inn too much, though.

Breakfast at Jake’s Cafe, featuring four very large pancakes and one very small egg. I cheated on my cardiologist and had coffee. It didn’t kill me, and may have helped make our tour of downtown Los Banos more successful.

 

Los Banos is an interesting town, and there’s more going on there than there seems to be any reason for. Downtown is a nice stroll, although we seemed to be about the only people strolling it. Mark almost scored a pair of maroon Chucks and I drooled over a (closed) repair shop full of antique TVs and radios.

 

And we sort of wished we’d had breakfast at the lunch counter in the drugstore. Drugstores which smell like bacon are my favorites.

We decided to spend the rest of the weekend in Salinas.

We had two cars and there was no realistic way of orienting this trip other than driving both of them to Salinas. Once again, we decided to meet at a Wal-Mart, maybe because that’s where my road atlas came from, so I have every location in the country at my fingertips. So it was back across Pacheco Pass for me, through Gilroy, and south on 101. We both made good time, and we were both happy to be in a nice, clean, relatively pleasant-smelling Motel 6.

The room required initiation, so we took care of that before doing further exploring. First time for either of us in both Merced and Monterey counties. There were other firsts too.

 

Afterward, we made the drive to Castroville for dinner at Norma’s Giant Artichoke, home of deep-fried artichoke hearts. To say that Norma piles on the food would be a severe understatement. The gastric revenge started in the gift shop (where Mark bought me a way cool miniature shopping cart) and didn’t completely let up until Sunday morning. But there will be no further details. And, lest this sound like a bad review, the food was great. There was just way too much of it.

 

After dinner, we hit Castroville for a few minutes, including a stop where we acted on out mutual passion for older Mexican supermarkets. Then I took Mark on the Salinas neon tour.

 

Salinas is an interesting town for fans of neon and old commercial architecture. One section of South Main Street features an amazing bowling alley (with full functioning neon), a former Lucky supermarket, and assorted other oddities.

 

Downtown and North Main are worth drive-throughs as well.

 

We also managed to scope out our likely breakfast establishment.

 

We concluded the neon tour with a somewhat vintage Safeway on Alisal, which I’d photgraphed before in the daytime. I was a little disappointed to see the sign neither illuminated nor spinning, but it was still impressive.

 

We picked up beer and other necessities at the Safeway and headed back to out Motel 6. We managed to get the heat working after about a half hour or so. And then we settled in and curled up for “Saturday Night Live” and other entertainments. For added flavor, we listened to out next door neighbors having very loud sex. That was fun. We vowed to annoy them by even noisier on Sunday morning.

I was close to comatose by this point from the food, from the previous night’s sleep deprivation, and from my first two beers in about six months. I slept hard.

 

Good sleep makes me happy. Waking up next to Mark on a rainy morning after good sleep made me very happy. We made noise, as planned, and heard even more disturbing noise from the neighbors. At one point, it sounded like they were trying to come through the adjoining room door.

When Mark was in the shower and I stepped outside for a cigarette, I was a little freaked out to see that one of the occupants of the room next door was a kid about 10 or 11. I chose not to think about whether he was a participant in the noisy sex or was just forced to watch and/or listen. His dad, or the adult with him at least, was a real redneck shitbag so I figured it could have gone either way.

 

After breakfast at the Armory Cafe, which we’d discovered the previous night, we strolled Main Street and the downtown area. Mark took pictures of lots of intact theatre buildings. I was fascinated by Hubert’s Shoes.

Then we ventured into the spiffy new National Steinbeck Center. It’s a great idea for a museum, and Steinbeck’s is some of the only fiction I actually read. Mark has even more of an obsession than I do. Unfortunately, it was one of that disturbing new breed of museum which seems to have a graphic designer as its curator rather than a historian. There were lots of gimmicks (too many of them child-intensive) and not nearly enough in the way of actual artifacts or information. The best part of the tour was a 13-minute documentary which wasn’t available for purchase in the gift shop, even though they had plenty of room for cookbooks which were unrelated to John Steinbeck in any way.

The afternoon concluded with a Watsonville drive-through. Interesting town, and a pretty lively one at that. There was some sort of immigrant protest going on, but we never figured out what it was about. Note to protesters: if your signs are illegible, it’s sort of hard to make your point.

At about 4;30, we both needed to get to our respective homes. I always hate this part of the weekend, and today was no exception. But it was a damned good weekend. And I think our weeklong trip to the Northwest next month will be a big success. I’ve found my travelling companion…