Barstow, CA

Another ride through the desert. I really had a hard time in the desert. Mostly just because everything about it was so hot and boring to look at. For this ride, we actually had to ride on the interstate the whole way - which is legal in the state we were in, thank goodness. The shoulder was really wide and clear so it wasn't very nerve wracking but when we were like 3 miles away from getting off the highway, a cop asked us to get on the access road and not be on the interstate anymore. Luckily, there was a road for us to get on, otherwise, we wouldn't have had a way to get to the next place. When we rolled up, we went to a place called the Calico Ghost Town and it was an old mining town that they had turned into a tourist attraction. One of the women that had been working there for a long time was very involved in Bike and Build and always provides dinner and lunch for the team when they get there, which was so amazing! We went over to one of the stores and she had made a ton of tacos with all sorts of salsa and guac dip. She also managed to get us free entry into all of the different attractions there. There was  a"fun house" where the house was built crooked so everything was an optical illusion and looked super wonky and weird. There was also a mine cave that we got to walk through and we got to mine for gold in the water with a pan, like I did when I was really young. But it was still a lot of fun! That night, the woman who made us dinner also had the restaurant in the ghost town make us a spaghetti dinner and then we went to the woman's house where she let us swim in her pool and she also had a lake in the backyard. The lake was kind of interesting because they put die in it and it was manmade in the middle of the desert but we had a lot of fun on her paddle boats. That night we slept in a cabin without air conditioning so I just took my mattress and slept outside on the front porch, which was so wonderful! A stressful and hot day ended up really wonderful!