Northbound

Maybe it's because I grew up in LA so I'm used to spending a ton of time driving from place to place, but I love road trips. I've talked before about how much I love driving to the desert, but I just also really like the space/atmosphere that road trips provide. (Rant kind of touches on this too in the party crashing scenes, and is also just a fantastic book that you should definitely read right now.) I'm not a morning person so road trips are also pretty much the only time I get to see the sun rise, and it's nice when someone else is driving so I get a chance to snap some pictures of it.




And if we get to stop at the garlic capital of the world on the way to our destination, that's just the icing on the cake.



<3

There's Always Money in the International Banana Museum

The day we went to Salvation Mountain was really an action packed day! On the way to Niland we passed a sign for a "World Famous International Banana Museum", so of course on the way back we kept an eye out and pulled over to investigate.

We didn't take any pictures inside because there was a sign asking that you make a purchase or a donation before taking any, but we did take some pictures with the stuffed banana outside, and the banana bug. The museum was actually pretty small but stuffed with boxes and cans from banana flavored foods, and other banana related items like a Bananas in Pajamas toy and a UCSC banana slugs sweater. There was also a counter where you could order milkshakes, presumably banana flavored as well.







Unexpected gems are really the best thing about road trips.

Bottom two photos taken by Isabel

Salton Sea

On the way back from Salvation Mountain, we stopped at the Salton Sea.

I hadn't heard of Salton Sea before I started looking up Salvation Mountain, and even then I didn't know any details about it. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. The shore is made of dead fish, which is disturbing enough to look at, but standing on it was such an unpleasant sensation I can't even completely describe how unsettling it was. In some places it was squishy and my feet were almost sinking into the dead fish mulch; I had to backtrack on to a firmer patch because I couldn't handle stepping on the squishy bits. The water looked horrible close-up, almost like sludge.








But then from a few steps back the lake looks gorgeous and peaceful.


It was a very, very strange place, and I kept thinking about it days after our trip. I read about how the sea was created by accident and how at one point they tried to make it into a Palm Springs-esque tourist destination but it never panned out. Now the sea is fed by agricultural run-off and the rising saline levels in the lake (it's currently saltier than the ocean) caused the massive fish die offs that give the sea it's eerie atmosphere. I found a movie on Netflix called "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea" which goes much more in depth on the environmental crisis that is the Sea, and on the communities that live in Niland/Bombay Beach. I definitely recommend checking it out if you're interested.




Top photo taken by Isabel

FUN in LA: Salvation Mountain

To be honest, I don't even remember when or where I first heard about Salvation Mountain. It's possible that I first saw it during it's cameo in Into the Wild, or in the A Beautiful Mess archives, or that I just saw a picture on tumblr somewhere. The first time that I thought of it as a place that I could actually go see was when my mom and I went to Palm Springs in 2012, and I wanted to make a detour to see it on the way. We were planning on going, but we ended up just staying in Palm Springs where there was air conditioning. (I don't know why we always end up going into the desert in August, but there you go. Driving out to the middle of nowhere in temperatures over 110 degrees doesn't always seem like the best idea.)

So what I'm getting at is that I've wanted to see Salvation Mountain for about 2 years now, so I was very excited when I brought it up to my friend Isabel and she said she wanted to see it too. We decided on a day and made plans to trek out to Niland to see Leonard Knight's creation. I was so sad when I heard just days before our trip that Leonard had died, and that news cast a different light on my experience of the mountain. It went from a piece of art to one man's life's work.

It took us about three hours to get down there, and the last hour of the drive there was literally nothing around. Just road and desert. When we finally caught sight of the mountain it was this big splash of color rising out of the emptiness. We walked all around it, inside it, and climbed the mountain and I was just blown away by it. Just the sheer size of it is incredible, and then you realize that one man built the whole thing and it becomes that much more mind-blowing.

There are signs on the mountain designating it as an American Folk Art site, and Isabel said something I thought was really interesting, that Salvation Mountain felt "very American." She talked about how the monuments and tourist attractions in Europe are usually religious, and this was like the American counterpart. I liked that a lot, it got the American Studies minor part of my head buzzing. I totally agree with her. I think in relation to the European cathedrals and shrines that were built as tributes to God over hundreds of years by thousands of people, it does seem really fitting that the American version would be built by one man all by himself out in the desert. It was hard to shake the John the Baptist vibes I got from the place too; a voice crying out in the wilderness that God is love.