A ritual we quickly established on our road trip was for me to look up the next small town we were coming up to on my iPhone while he drove. I Wiki-ed dozens of tiny towns in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. More often than not we enjoyed the “facts” of town, most of which were established during the migration west in the late 1800’s and involved the rail road.

Driving home, I looked up “Desert Center, CA” and it was by far the most interesting and in depth Wikipedia entry I read aloud. So much information (and drama) for such a little town in the middle of literally nowhere. A preacher who writes bad poetry and gets shunned for “dallying,” the country’s first managed health care, lots of fortune, even more loss, and palm trees planted in a crazy pattern. Read it.

A Google search on Desert Center also brought up an interesting photo stream on Flickr of the town’s abandoned schoolhouse. The images were beautiful and strange. As soon as we saw them, we knew we had to exit off the boring 10 and check it out. And I really wanted to steal that typewriter.

The school is situated right alongside the Interstate and is surprisingly new for being abandoned.  We stepped over the chain barring the driveway and poked around. Alas, the typewriters were gone, but everything else looked much like Bill Lindsay’s Flickr pictures.

A couple of hundred yards down the dirt road from the school was another motel we did not stay at: