I’m a 50 something woman who has never been in trouble with the law outside of a few speeding and parking tickets. You might wonder who would ban me from Barstow, California. My husband, that’s who! He said I’m not allowed to set foot in Barstow ever again. If we’re ever traveling through, he’s going to keep on going …no stopping!
We were on our first kid-less trailer trip. Our son needed to catch up on some school and our daughter was working. They turned into perfect house and dog sitters. At the time, they weren’t getting along consistently. So, we decided to leave them each (separately) money for food and then, offered them house and dog sitting money under the condition that we didn’t get any calls to break up arguments or solve problems for them. If something broke, it was up to them to figure out how to fix it or live without it until we got home. It worked out really well! We got no calls or texts and it made for a really fun time away.
We were well into this two-week trip. We had been to Zion National Park and climbed Angel’s Landing and hiked the Narrows (we highly recommend those hikes!). We had been to Las Vegas to visit my husband’s parents and Elvis. (We learned a LOT the hard way about how to camp in Vegas in the summer!). We were having a great time! We were headed to Anaheim from Vegas to make a kid-less trip to Disneyland. That’s when I got banned from Barstow.
I have always hated Barstow. When we were kids, we would travel from Long Beach, California to Albuquerque, New Mexico in a day. Straight through. 18 hours in the back seat with my brothers….on the hump. My parents liked saving money by getting “liquor store breakfasts” consisting of powdered doughnuts and juice. Yeah, put that in the gut of the kid sitting on the hump who gets car sick! Great Idea! Barstow is usually where the doughnuts and juice kicked in and I felt pretty sick. In fact, as a kid, I called it “Barf-stow.”
Thankfully, my husband is totally opposed to a liquor store breakfast. In fact, a selling point for both of us about RVing is, we can make our own breakfast before hitting the road. If we have to leave too early, we have a non-nauseating Starbucks back-up plan. It works for us. When we first started RVing, we would stop and make lunch on the side of the road to save money. Later, we decided it was more fun to stop someplace (usually, we let the kids pick) and get something at a fast-food place. Especially, since some of our picnic stops were, well, a little embarrassing to our daughter when she was about 12. It turns out the grass in front of a bank isn’t so much like a park and it’s not cool to have a picnic there. Now we usually skip the picnics at lunch time and stop someplace like a fast-food restaurant.
My husband may be the world’s biggest In-N-Out Burger fan. It’s really unfortunate since we live in the Pacific Northwest and there are none here. He plans our trips so that we leave the RV park in time to hit an In-N-Out for lunch on the road whenever we’re in the land of In-N-Outs. It doesn’t matter to him if we had In N Out for lunch the day before. We’re still stopping! If you’ve ever been through Barstow, you know it has an exit with just about every fast food option available. Of course, my husband planned it so we would hit Barstow at lunch time for In-N-Out. This would be our 4th In-N-Out lunch on this trip. One In-N-Out visit per vacation is fine with me, mind you.
I can’t remember what day of the week it was, but it was a busy day in Barstow! It was July, and a lot of people were traveling through. We got off the freeway and headed toward In-N-Out looking for 40 acres to park. That’s where everything started to go south…..
I spotted an outlet mall. There’s always bus parking at an outlet mall. Surely, that would be a great place to park! My husband saw a bank that had a bunch of empty spaces in front and thought he might go there. Unfortunately, I didn’t speak up before he was headed toward the left turn lane toward the bank and as he says, the launch sequence was already started. We couldn’t adjust our course toward the outlet mall.
We got to the bank and took up about 6 spaces and he said, “I don’t like this. You wait here and I’m going to walk over there and see if I can find something better.” He left the car running and walked off. Now, we were driving a twelve-year-old Suburban. One of its many quirks was, the air conditioner only really worked when the car was moving, and it wasn’t, and it was Barstow … in July. It was getting super hot in the car by the time he got back. He said, “OK, we’re going to go out that exit in the parking lot and park over there by that outlet mall.” It would have really helped if he would have added, “right where you suggested,” but he didn’t.
OK fine! We’re all parked by the outlet mall and by now, I’m really hungry and overheated. Off to In N Out we go. We have great teamwork when it comes to In-N-Out. He gets in line to order and I “vulture-ize” the tables. As in, I stand and watch for someone to get up and swoop in and take their table when they leave. Well, I did my vulture-izing and got us a table. I waited …. And waited….. As I was waiting, I was staring at a Chipotle sign and a Panera sign and thinking, “I bet we’d have our food by now if we ate over there.” 45 minutes (yes, you read that right 45 minutes!) later, he comes out with the food and says, “There was a whole tour bus right in front of us!” Of course, I was completely grumpy by then. He’s all happy because he has his In-N-Out. He didn’t care how long it took him to get it! He couldn’t understand why I as so annoyed. I had to explain. That’s when he said, “I’m NEVER taking you to Barstow again!” (YAY! I never have to go to Barstow again!!)
We ate, I got less grumpy, and we got on the road. About 20 minutes down the road in Victorville, we spotted another In-N-Out from the freeway. It had its own 40 acres of parking and hardly any cars in it! We agreed, Barstow is jinxed and we’ll just have to move on next time!
Not every day or every moment of RVing is wonderful! Sometimes, you have to make a joke out of your situation. Barstow has been a long running one and a reason why we pay closer attention to the google earth map when we’re planning our stops. I hope you found our Barstow story amusing. Maybe you have your own version of our Barstow story. I hope you’ve been able to find the humor in it and make it part of your vacation humor.
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