This is Part 2 of the letter postmarked January 24, 1968. This part covers Sunday, January 21.
Sunday morning we decided to go to the Calico Ghost Town. This place is owned by the same people that own Knott's Berry Farm and it is not as commercialized - everything there is old and just like it was when it was a mining town. The only trouble with the place is that it's so far away - it took about three hours of driving to get there.
[Calico Ghost Town is in Yermo, CA, which is about two and a half hours northeast of Los Angeles. Calico was a mining town during the California silver rush of the 1880s, then became a ghost town after silver lost its value in the mid-1890s. Walter Knott purchased Calico in the 1950s.]
[Mom doesn't mention it, but just before we got to Calico we must have stopped in Barstow and taken some pictures at a park. Barstow is home to a Marine Corps Logistics Base and Fort Irwin Army Base. Surplus military equipment must be a common sight in that area because Mom's caption for this first photo indicates that we found this old tank in a park.]
[Note that Mom is six months pregnant in that picture. I don't know what was going on with me at the time, but if you zoom in on my face it looks like I wasn't very happy. Maybe that bare metal tank was burning my butt through my britches.]
[The next photo is me and Mom inside the tank. I look much happier there in the shade.]
We took a picnic lunch. (Dave's really pinching pennies so he can get me that washing machine quickly!) David Wayne wore his guns, holster, and cowboy hat and we got some really cute pictures. He took a donkey ride, all of us took a train ride, went through a museum, and we walked through an old mine. We had a good time and really it didn't cost us much as admission and parking were free and we didn't have to eat out.
[Here are various photos of our day at Calico. Let me begin by saying I didn't include all of the pictures from Calico Ghost Town, not even all the pictures of me.]
[First up is me (with my awesome red cowboy hat) in an antique wagon. The front of the wagon says:
Lanes
General Merchandise
Free Delivery
[Next is me (with my awesome red cowboy hat, holster, and gun) and Dad in front of a sign that says "1881 Calico Lives Again." Behind that sign you can see "CALICO" in gigantic letters near the top of the mountain. You will note that this picture is a little blurry, much like a previous picture of me where the blurriness was blamed on me doing the pee dance. I doubt Dad and I both needed to go while Mom was taking this picture.]
[Next is me riding a donkey. If I don't look like a real cowboy there with my red hat, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, then nobody does.]
[Next is me sitting in a very large cast iron kettle with this lettering on the front:
Chinese bath tub
Back Scrub 5 cents
Full Scrub 10 cents
(Try it for size)
[That's all the pictures I'll be showing from Calico Ghost Town, but it should come as no surprise that Mom saved some items from our visit, much like she did for almost every other place we visited. Since I doubt we'll be back here before we move back to Texas, given how far Calico is from Los Angeles, I won't be able to spread these out over several posts. Therefore, you now get to experience the Calico Ghost Town Ephemera Extravaganza!]
[First up is a nice tri-fold brochure giving the history of Calico and the current layout. Fully unfolded it's 11" x 17" so it required four full-page scans to get it all. You're welcome. If you read closely you'll see two mentions of the Walter Knott connection to the original Calico mining town.]
[Next is a scan that includes each of the different tickets Mom saved from Calico, not including duplicates. These have a similar look to the tickets from Knott's Berry Farm, but they don't have as much clever writing.]
We left Calico at 5 o'clock but we didn't get home until after 9! The traffic was terrible. First, we ran into the cars coming in from Las Vegas and also there was a truck that had lost control and blocked all but one lane. For two hours we just creeped along, stopping and starting a little at a time - it was horrible. Only our sense of humor kept us from going batty. We ate supper in the car on the freeway - I told Dave it was a good thing we had our leftover picnic food with us or we could starve to death on an L. A. freeway. Then Dave really got me tickled by saying, "I'm glad I'm not taking you to the hospital to have the baby." Then we tried to guess how many babies were born on freeways each year in L. A. Poor Dave was so tried when we finally arrived home - he had a headache, his back and neck were stiff and sore, and he just fell in the bed. He wasn't much better this morning and I felt really sorry for him having to go to work.
[We will conclude Part 2 of this letter here.]
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