Missed turnings leave us not quite there

Well I can honestly say today was by far the most frustrating day on the road to date. A mix of shoddy navigation, changed road layouts and simple missed turn offs cause the following..... 390 miles driven, 10 hours behind the wheel, not quite making the end of the road and having to double back to find the Hollywood sign tomorrow and then the conclusion of the Mother Road.
Despite all this we saw some great things drove on some great roads and had some good food.
So to the start of the day, we checked out fine The Nissan Altima, see I know the model now, was brought up and we were good to go. If only my internal compass was good to go as well.....It takes us almost an hour to refind Highway 95 back towards Needles. Back into California, we had passed through it ever so briefly on the way to Las Vegas, the final state on our adventure. Once on this road it was all systems go. And things went swimmingly for a couple of hours or so. We saw something quite odd though.....In the middle of nowhere we saw, about 300 yards from the road, a painted hippy style

bus an old caravan and a bit of a shed. As it stands thats just the norm for Old Route 66 however about a mile and a half further along we see a guy walking towards the off road accommodation. Now at this point it was 99F the sun was blaring down and this guy, looking remarkably like the bald guy from The Hills Have Eyes, is wandering down the highway in jeans a leather waistcoat no hat no water eating a large bag of crisps. Now we carried on down the road and the very next bit of civilisation was another 7 1/2 miles, a small store and shack, which begs the question... Who could / would make a 15 mile round walk in blistering heat to fetch a bag of crisps???
Well we continued on, for the most part we had great views to the left, right, front and in the rearview mirror. Quite a few railroad crossings again on this stretch and we get caught by them a couple of times. There is also a long stretch of the road where people have written there names in rocks along the road side, some are even spraypainted!! Our guide book advises of poisonous snakes and heatstroke if you are attempting to leave your mark so we give it a miss. There are also a couple of deserted half buildings obviously occasionally used for parties.We passed by The Bagdad Cafe from the film of the same name. We were going to stop for something to eat

but a coach load of tourists had just arrived and its not a very big place. So a quick photo stop and on our way again.We thought we ought to stop for some breakfast......well very loosely as we were now into the afternoon. We stop at Tom's Burgers in Barstow. We had a Bacon and Avocado Cheeseburger, A Philly Steak and Cheese Sandwich both with Fries and Diet Pepsi's and very nice it was too. Tom's was steady all the while we were there and even as we were leaving family groups were meeting in the carpark before making their way inside. Back on the road and we carry on making good progress. We see the Bottle Tree Ranch a cool sculpture park if you like of metal frames with bottles and Route 66 memorabilia shaped into trees. Our progress is halted at San Bernardino where they have changed the layout of the intersections making our instructions very confusing it took well over half an hour to figure out where we had ended up then probably the same to get back to somewhere on the route then I spent 15 minutes travelling East instead of West...d'oh! Well it must be the heat it's hovered between 99F and 103F all day and one sign even put it at 107F.
Well by now Donna needed a wee so we found a Walmart...thought we could get some bread to have with soup tonight, two birds with one stone and all that. Back on the road and the sun is getting lower in the sky making driving more and more difficult eventually I have

to pull off the road and get some fuel I figure give it a 5 minute break and I should be able to see the lights and roadsigns again.Well $33 of fuel in and I was right too, back on the road and moving well, but for every 10 minutes we drive only 5 minutes was coming off the time to the end of the trip we are never going to get there. It's dark as we hit LA and the roads go to 4 or 5 lanes 55mph to 65 mph and twisting as well..... missed one exit and that was it we were off The Mother Road tired and in the dark I guess we will have to back track tomorrow find the Hollywood sign and do the final few miles of Route 66. So we follow the Sat Nav to Best Western Plus Gateway Santa Monica. Checked in got the stuff upstairs and guess what.....No Microwave, we had just assumed there would be as there has been in the other Best Westerns... No mention of it in the description though.....So it was snacks before bed. If that wasn't bad enough the first time I wrote today's entry I managed to accidentally close the app losing

everything I had written. Only wasted another 45 Mins there didn't I !! Well let's hope tomorrow is a day less frustrating than the latter part of today.