Day 3, Thursday May 4th We spent the night in Victorville. Thanks to Duncan’s flirting with the very nice and well endowed innkeeper we received a free upgrade to a suite! I had no idea that Motel6 had suites.
As mentioned in the beginning, our third day and the reason we detoured east was to try out some roads around Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake. Google it, the roads are awesome! We took the 15 down to 138 through Crestline, then the 18 and the 330 back towards San Bernadino. While driving through Crestline, I saw this yellow MR2 parked on the side of the road. I noticed that it was a ‘94+ and pulled over immediately to check it out (and look like a crazy person).
It was a genuine ’94 NA, auto, just like I had started with. As we were looking at it a lady came out of the hair salon and chatted us up. Wendy was quite a passionate owner and was happy to talk ‘2’s for a while. Duncan managed to score her number too! She said something about trying to buy a center storage console from him, but I’m sure she wanted more.
Once we started to see civilization we drove the 210 (boring) towards the Mt.Baldy turn off. We drove up the hill towards the mountain. Mt.Baldy was certainly not our destination, our plan was to drive Glendora Mountain Road (GMR). It’s quite well know in Socal as a great twisty piece of tarmac. You can tell by this sign that word has already gotten out.
When you start from Baldy, you are actually on Glendora Ridge rd, and this is a big sketchy because it’s super tight (awesome), but it’s quite narrow (bad) and there’s no center line (also bad), so, people (that you can’t see) coming from the other direction are always driving in the middle of the road (very bad)! There was also a bunch of road work going on and large dump trucks driving the road. Once we got to the intersection with Glendora mtn rd started things got better. This had a centerline, but god damn was it a tight and crazy road. The few little spots that opened up I managed about 40mph. What a great rollercoaster ride! After that, we stopped for a cold drink and some air conditioning before heading towards the hotel. Martin managed to Airbnb the owners suite in a little motel. It had a big living room & kitchen, a bedroom with a queen bed and then a second bedroom with two double bunks (so, four beds). It worked out quite well despite the single bathroom.
I took off to LAX to pick up Sonja and by the time I got back Marc & Minna had come and gone, and then Martin showed up! I guess he had enough of me hassling him about making the trip down. Drew arrived a little later that night after visiting his cousin in San Jose.