Birthday - first halfsies

After a lovely Denny's dinner and sleeping at a truck stop east of Barstow, I woke up early and had a delicious bacon breakfast at Mad Greek Cafe near Baker, CA which boasted the "Best Gyros in the USA." It was too early to find out if that was really true.
Across the street was a popular place that I wish I had known about the night before:
Next I headed into the Mojave to find Cima, Ivanpah, Vanderbilt, and Rose, most of which are abandoned rain stations/mining towns within the natural preserve.
Houses at Cima: Vanderbilt was basically one large foundation and a wall: Looking through a busted main frame at Rose with peeping Joshua trees: Next I went to find Ivanpah. There are actually two Ivanpahs. One is in the Mojave preserve and is an abandoned train station, and the other is off of highway 15 just outside. I followed Varney's instructions very carefully, noting my milage and everything. I ended up winding left and right down these crazy dirt roads and finally landing on a Y and not knowing which way to go. The road up ahead was impassible, so I got out and started walking. I quickly realized that I was on the wrong road because I could see the stone walls of several 100+ year old buildings on the road below. I turned around to go down and that's when I saw many gigantic kitty cat prints in the sand. I know...they might look like dog prints...but these things were massive.

A bag of gummy frogs later, and on my way to a Lake Mead camping spot (where the grocery store cashier sang happy birthday to me and a mean lady with 6 golden retrievers was camping), I found this very interesting desert structure. Funny Varney never mentioned it.

Days 3 through 5 are coming up shortly, and they are better because I am older in them.