I slept so well last night here at the Ludlow Motel: the breakfast menu in my room invites me over to the café for FLUFFY

I don't order the FLUFFY, but instead order an omelet. It's good, but it's really just an excuse to have another one of Ludlow Café's tasty homemade biscuits.

Ludlow Motel, in the heart of the Mojave Desert, has soap in the bathrooms called "Coastal Breezes"

There's always lots of wind in the desert, but none of it is coastal.

Between the Ludlow Café and the Ludlow Motel rests a former gas station, decorated with a couple of old vehicles

I like the old fire truck with built-in water tank. The other vehicle is an old van.

Please, have a seat

I wonder why they once painted over the old window. The long-lost padding from this seat probably made it into birds' nests years ago.

Loadmaster

Classic period design with a deco moderne touch.

The two antique vehicles are protected from sun and rain under the old gas-station canopy

Flat tires make it more difficult for passing freeway thugs to steal the vehicles.

Interesting switches on the dashboard panel of the old van

Those little plastic labels look very 1970s.

Faux wood paneling in the back of the old van, sagging a little

This looks like a kitschy update to the van during a later period of its life. Where's the fake brick that should accompany it?

I'm out of my motel room by 10h30 and start my way up the first 8-mile segment of Route 66 toward Barstow from Ludlow

The "old road" parallels the speedy freeway here, just a few feet away at my left. A strong headwind is forecast, but I'm not getting one yet (yee haw!). Still, it's slow-going since I'll rise about 600 feet on this stretch.

After almost six miles, I notice a little sign for "Sleeping Beauty Road"

I didn't see this sign when I passed by here almost a week ago because it was already dark then.

I stop at Sleeping Beauty Road for a very short break; it occurs to me that I could ride up this road and do a nice hike

If it were late in the day, I would stop and camp around here. But with strong headwinds forecast for my bicycle ride back to the Amtrak bus stop in Barstow, I should keep going, just in case.

Old Route 66 makes a couple of 90-degree turns in order to cross the I-40 freeway

There's that "tube of civilization" again, beneath me, of people driving through the desert without experiencing it. That black hill in the distance is part of the Pisgah lava formation, and I'll be passing by it shortly.

As old Route 66 crosses the tracks just after an I-40 overpass, I'm briefly facing Pisgah Crater

I consider an unplanned side trip over to Pisgah Crater, but remind myself that I want to camp further on in the Newberry Springs area today, perhaps in the Rodman Mountains.

Not long after I cross the tracks, another one of those endless freight trains passes by

...presumably headed to Los Angeles.

I'm on that rough part of old Route 66 again between Newberry Springs and Pisgah siding

Since this is no longer the main road through the area (the adjacent I-40 freeway is now), it's not well-maintained. Only a few cars have passed me since I left Ludlow a couple of hours ago. Bump, bump, bump.