Don’t call this kitsch too soon. I started my journey by car from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and after an easy drive of 196 kilometres I find a diner like straight from a Hollywood film. If James Dean would have come up to take my order I wouldn’t even have been surprised really. How did I end up here? I see these massive letters on an old lorry from the freeway and think it would be great to stop at a diner in the middle of, and this is a fact, nowhere.
The Mojave Freeway and a caramel brown mountain range
From the parking space where one could as well easily park an Airbus A 380 I can see the cars driving past in front of a caramel brown mountain range. The whole scenery gets even more bizarre when army tanks approach directly opposite over the Mojave Freeway and next to a street called Ghost Town Road. They must surely be part of a drill manoeuvre or something. I step out of the blazing heat and into the diner through a jukebox, others might call it entrance. Was this Marilyn Monroe? No.
Eat a Sheriff John at Peggy Sue’s
This place is so packed with all sorts of paraphernalia I can hardly concentrate on the menu I have been given by the lovely waitress dressed in a turquoise apron with pink fringes and a matching cotton bonnet that holds back her hair. I decide to eat a Sheriff John (not the Sheriff John) and to drink a mug of coffee, which gets refilled every time I finish it. After what feels like four or five cups of coffee my cheese sandwich (with that unique name) arrives. I make myself comfy in the booth, keep on admiring the decor in great detail, and wash it down with at least another three cups of coffee. I eat to the beat as advised at the entrance and again on one of the wooden boards in the dining room.
While at first the coffee refill felt a bit overwhelming, I was forced to drink eight cups of that filtered brew or so, I am now delighted as it makes me go to the bathroom. And on my way there I pass another two rooms and they are just as packed with Kitsch and as the one where I ate my sandwich. The joy is in the journey and not in the destination, so very true. I pass a room with a black chequered and one with a red chequered floor, and there is Elvis, Cleopatra, Betty Boo, the Blues Brothers and even a few others eating lunch.
I step out of Peggy Sue’s and back into the blazing heat, jump into my rental car and test the brakes extensively on the gravel (spinning a car in a circle is so much fun) before I drive on towards Las Vegas. And that again sounds kitsch.
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| Just spinning the wheels ... |
