Calico

20th September

Today is the last day of being on the tour group’s schedule! No more bag call or bus departure time’s yay!

On the road at 8am for the 2 hour drive to Calico Ghost Town, again one of those stops we just didn’t have enough time at, we arrive and Matt makes friends with the cowboy that welcomes people to the town.

Found a place to have a meal and then explored the ghost town a bit, it’s an actual old gold mining town with mines and miners huts and a small township which has been converted to a living museum. Dad would have loved this.

Back on the bus next stop Barstow where we grab some lunch and a coffee at Starbucks, I had an iced Chili coffee wasn’t too bad. There is a big outlet store place here and we looked around it, but of several hundred shops only a handful remain open, it’s like one of those ghost towns you see in China.

The final stretch of the tour as we roll into Los Angeles in the mid-afternoon, check into the hotel and hit the pool, it’s a nice warm day but we can’t really use the pool for risk of infecting our fresh tattoo’s. We spotted a homeless guy who has camped just outside the hotel grounds sad to watch his daily routine unfold just outside our window.

This evening we headed off to Santé Monica for a farewell dinner with the tour group. The sunset at the beach was beautiful and the dinner at Rusty’s Surf Ranch was enjoyable and it was nice to be able to see everyone off, some of the strangers that looked a bit weird in New York turned out to be the most fun.