Antiques! (And Good Friends)

I love old things, thinking of those hands which may have originally fashioned and then used something. My best friend since college came over to visit last week for a couple of days and we decided to make it a priority to visit some of Bakersfield’s myriad antique stores. The old downtown section along 19th Street and environs is filled with at least 12 major antique stores, some of which are huge malls with individual booths which take hours to get through. Oh man, what a fun couple of days! 

Parking is easy along these streets, especially first thing in the mornings but is limited to only 30 minutes to an hour. Certain sections farther east along 19th seem not to merit the attention of the traffic cop chalk-marking tires but we diligently moved my friend’s pickup as we finished with one store and moved on to the next. I’m a sucker for old rusted and vintage iron anything and I scored well in the first store with a couple of items. Once I walked into the booth and saw this fabulously simple iron chair with striking lines I knew it had to belong to me next! As I was checking out with this purchase I happened to mention that I was also looking for an old coffee grinder. The very helpful older lady showed me to a booth where I had totally skipped noticing this beauty. It too, became mine and I was pleased to see on EBay that the auctions were commanding up to $575 for the same model. I got mine for a fraction of that price although it is missing the top dome. But it has a melodic groan as I push the wheel around and around grinding breakfast coffee. We next wandered into the most amazing collection of memorabilia and antiques I have ever seen under one roof. Housed in an old building with beautiful strips of ancient and well-worn hardwood flooring, this place simply “rocked” if you are an antique lover! The prices weren’t cheap so I only ended up with a couple of beautifully aged turquoise bottles. I certainly wanted to cart home one of these beautiful Parisian wrought iron gates though. Most astounding was a beautiful entire library wall of walnut wood and stained glass with double entry doors which probably came out of some old English mansion. In addition, if one is ever looking for a real working toaster—you know, the kind from the mid last century like Sunbeam and Toastmaster which in all their chrome beauty continued to work past the three month mark, in fact are still working 60 years later, you can find aisle after aisle of them here. This alone could definitely require a revisit on my part. By this time we were hungry so asked the antique store owner about local dives with good food within walking distance. He recommended La Costa Mexican seafood on 21st and it did not disappoint. Fueled up, after lunch we continued our jaunts. We had so much fun we decided to continue the next day and came across the nostalgic old Woolworth building; now housing a two-story antique mall called the Five & Dime, complete with its original luncheonette. You remember those don’t you? 

I grew up in a small town in northern California and I can remember Woolworth’s is where I bought the fabric for my first sewing project in high school sewing with Mrs. Casagrande; a raglan-sleeved blouse with no collar. Of course, this was prior to the advent of JoAnn’s and other fabric stores so Woolworth's was where you went—the WalMart of its day. To this day I can also remember sitting with my mother on one of these stools, munching into a Woolworth’s hot dog, which was done up on a toasted special bread-type bun with its special sauce. The singular taste remains in my mouth these many years later. What a kick it was to see this. Well naturally I continued to find some treasures that just had to come “home” with me. I found a lovely vintage original French hand towel holder which we had fun researching to see what the French meant. That will go somewhere in my kitchen. Oh, and more old iron in this shabby-chic vintage light fixture which I will have Marc make into a swag light to hang somewhere. I loved this smaller sized old trunk but just couldn’t figure out where I would put it right now. Ah, antiques. Aren’t they fun?

Our Home for 30 Days

If you are on a time budget hauling an RV, never take Hwy. 247 through California’s eastern desert area! This narrower, hilly and sinuous highway, running through several smaller desert towns, can really cause one to lose time and such was the case for us heading for our new project in Bakersfield. Looking at the map and noting much BLM land, I had the mistaken impression that boondocking off this highway would be an easy thing. All the small dirt roads leaving the pavement looked unsuitably sandy and rough and thus we ended up tired and frustrated by the time we reached Barstow.

Since the left taillight had gone out on the RV, we pulled into the Home Depot sitting alongside I-15 for Marc to purchase repair parts. A little known fact is that Home Depot has a generally liberal policy on allowing overnight parking for RVers and we have often used them all across the U.S. Asking in the store for permission and finding no objections, we soon had ourselves set up for a relatively peaceful night behind the well lit store. The views weren’t bad either!   From Barstow it was an easy morning trek the following day into the Bakersfield RV Resort, our home for the next month, which sits behind a gated entrance on nicely manicured and opulent grounds. There is a sparkling pool and spa, weight room and even an on-site restaurant with patio dining. Those are the upsides—the downside is that there is no extra parking so we had to rent two adjacent spaces so we would have room for the truck and Saturn. Although the adjacent site isn’t charged a full blown rate, at $300 a month just to park an extra vehicle, it doesn’t come cheap. The other objection is that excepting for a spot in the main office, internet connection is virtually non-existent, even using our MIFI card. There are radio towers and high voltage lines which seem to cancel out signals, so a month without internet directly from the RV is going to be a total pain. Given our two sites and backing up to a tall back wall of the park, it does allow Rocket lots of room to frolic in the grass and is fairly private. It’s great too that there is lots of bird life in the small trees to occupy his time. So overall, Bakersfield shouldn’t be a bad gig; excepting of course, the lack of internet.

Time to Leave

Just as the others complete their mass exodus from Yuma, so we’ll be joining the tail of the bandwagon Thursday morning; back to the grind of more Chili’s projects in California. Our first stop will be Bakersfield for three weeks. The company has indicated that they have enough work to keep Marc busy the rest of the year.

I managed to get several yard projects completed, including pepping things up with some vivid paint colors, refurbing some patio furniture, and finally getting my real-honest-to-goodness fountain that I’ve always desired, purchased and installed! Too bad I won’t be around to enjoy it--it is supremely relaxing! Marc finally replaced the water pump in the Travel Supreme so we may be able to boondock once again. Bakersfield is only about 400 miles but that is really more than we like to drive in one day and that distance also becomes very hard on our little boy Rocket since he rides on my lap the entire time as I follow in the car. He does well for around six to seven hours then gets pretty agitated as though to say “Enough already!”

Another Snowbird Season Ends

With temperatures approaching the very high 90’s already in Yuma, winter visitor season is rapidly drawing to a close. The freeways are once again clogged with RVs heading north or east and it will only be a matter of a couple weeks until our neighborhood becomes deathly quiet once again. We ourselves won’t be here long to enjoy the quiet since Marc’s next Chili’s project is in Bakersfield starting April 21st. 

As homage to the season, our neighbors Stan and Patty threw their traditional St. Paddy’s Day Party, including lots of wearing of the green. Marc was unable to attend since he is camped out at Lake Martinez helping out on a remodel but despite the 97 degrees, I joined in for some fabulous food, including Patty’s corned beef Irish stew. Hot food for a hot day? You bet! The best part though was watching Stan do his Elvis impersonation as he sang karaoke “Suspicious Minds”. Marc and I recently took a couple weeks looking around at other parts of Arizona for some land on which to eventually build but after wandering around the Verde Valley area and Cottonwood and then farther south in Marana (outside Tucson) and Casa Grande we came up empty handed. Although we saw some beautiful pieces of property, there always seemed to be a “gotcha” which upon deep consideration precluded it from possibility. Our favorite town was Casa Grande, recently very improved with major new shopping and now, recession-languishing subdivisions. It enjoys a very central location between Phoenix and Tucson plus sports all the medical we were looking for. Although there were some fine acreage type parcels available the deal killer became the cost of walling or fencing them off for security purposes. I’m just not into spending $24,000 for a block wall. There was also the consideration that Casa Grande really only runs about five degrees cooler than Yuma in summer and that’s not quite enough for us. We did attend the state Chili Cook-off where we sampled some killer chili, including our favorite by this Glendale schoolteacher, Kilt Lifter Chili. We came to the conclusion to sit tight for now and see how the future plays out with my mother’s aging and what she might require in terms of our presence later on. Or at least, my daily presence later on, because she has no long term care insurance so it will fall to us to take care of her in the event of a health catastrophe. 

We did attend the Yuma Air Show this year and stayed for about half of it. With the long walk to and from the parking lot and standing (we had not thought to bring chairs), Marc’s foot was just killing him and by 1 p.m. he had enough. There certainly was a lot going on to entertain the masses and some of the vintage planes were really a sight to see, including Fifi, the last flying B-29—the same model which dropped the bombs on Japan ending WWII. As many of you have noticed my updates to the blog have fallen by the wayside. There is only so much inspiration when one faces the mundane world of daily work, even though in different locations. I will plan to continue to write an entry as the notion strikes but they will likely occur very randomly unless something in our lives changes to make it different.

Where's the Grub?

Something that’s fun to do as we travel around is compare grocery shopping in various areas. I can remember when we lived in Iowa for a winter thinking that for a farm state, their stores sure didn’t stock much in the way of any “exotic” vegetables. Things like avocados were hard to come by. They had never heard of white corn. On numerous occasions I’d hear the cashier ask me, “What is this?” holding up a vegetable they were unfamiliar with. 

Surprisingly, what strikes me as most common is that the larger the area in population, the harder it is to find grocery stores. Why is that? You’d think with a larger population base, there would be more stores, not less. In the Los Angeles area, I would often have to drive miles to a store and then there would only be the one, so no choice or competition. And try finding a grocery store in Las Vegas sometime. 

Here in the Folsom and foothill area of El Dorado County there are so many stores offering groceries it is a virtual Mecca! Not only are there many different chains, but there are several stores within close proximity of each other in the same chain. Just as an aside I have noted: Safeway, Food 4 Less, BelAir, Raley’s, Nugget, Costco, Sam’s, Trader Joe’s, Grocery Outlet, WalMart Superstore, Supersaver, & Whole Foods. These are only the ones I have personally seen; I’m sure there’s probably more! Now Folsom is a town of 72,200 people but even figuring the greater area at 150,000 this is an outstanding array of choice in groceries! 

One would leave with the impression that people here must really cook at home, but the incongruity is that there are also more restaurants available than I’ve ever seen in any given area. Every corner is loaded with four or five and the shopping centers and strip malls are also full of them. So, which is it? Do people here cook at home or are they always eating out? How can some cities offer only two or three grocery stores and the same sized city in another state offers up ten or fifteen? Who makes these decisions, anyway?

I’ll leave you with some pictures of probably the fanciest grocery store I have ever entered. This is the Nugget Market in El Dorado Hills, a town of 42,108 of very high income demographic.

A few things were striking about this store, starting with the exterior with its filligreed metal window awnings. Inside the pre-made food/deli section occupied an entire side, far eclipsing any other section. Just about anything you would desire to cook or eat (pizza, Chinese, 20 kinds of salad) was already waiting for you. As part of this area, there was also a dedicated cheese “bar”. Look at those wheels of cheese! Seen anything like this?

The other end of the store, normally occupied in most cases by the vegetable section, is solely for wine in this store. I’m not sure even Total Wine stores stock more than was on display here.

The vegetable section, by comparison, was notably front and center and rather on the small side. Yes, this is the entire area.

Another novelty was a section dedicated to candy, dried fruits, nuts, and exotic items like seaweed or okra chips, all pre-packed. That was quite amazing as well. And finally, the seafood section was respectable given that we are a distance from the ocean.

Do any other inquiring minds wonder about things like this, as I do?