Post Offices: Chiriaco Summit CA

Whenever we take a road trip out to Phoenix, there's a long drag across the Mojave Desert on I-10.  At the halfway mark there is our favorite stop: Chiriaco Summit.  It has a gas station, diner, gift shop, and a holistic retreat of some kind.  The diner has a big shady patio with tables to sit at, and there used to be 8 to 10 cats there, curled up between flower pots and rocks.  We saw no cats this time -- or last time, now that I think about it -- and the lady at the diner said they don't come around anymore.  That's a shame, because it made it a more cozy spot to stop.

There is also a post office.







As we sat in the diner, we saw this old photo with a caption talking about how the PO was founded in 1953.

We stopped at the actual post office to mail a postcard,  but it is only open a few hours a day on weekdays.  On a Saturday, we couldn't buy a stamp or get a postmark.  The gift shop was surprisingly large, but the PO is just a contract office with limited hours.

The George Patton Museum is right next door, since the General used to train troops in the Mojave area.

I always wonder how these businesses find enough workers, as it's 40-60 miles in either direction to any town at all, and it's over 100 degrees for three months each year.  Also, how is it a summit when it's flat as pancake for miles?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Industrial Nightmare from Saar

Image
From the 1920s to 1950s, there were a lot of stamps showing factories with huge plumes of pollution.  This was most pronounced from Eastern Europe and Russia after WWII, where the workers were stylized and turned into icons, and industry was rampant. Here is a stamp from Saar (Scott #98) which is depressing every time I see it. The catalog says this is the Burbach Steelworks in Dillingen, Germany.  This stamp is high on my mental list of the ugliest stamps ever printed.  It's dark, low contrast, and badly over-inked.  The design is so bad, in fact, that you can't even read the printed value of 25c at the bottom, and it was almost immediately surcharged "5 FRANKEN". I was also wondering if those were dollar signs in the lower corners. The underlying stamp (#83) is the high value of a long set of blurry, smudgy grey/brown/black images of towns.  Here are some stamps from that set.  These usually have heavy, smudgy postmarks.  As someone who enjoys fin...
Read more

Wendy Fitzwilliam

Image
I was scanning a collection from Trinidad & Tobago tonight, and this set came up, one which I have wondered about for a while now. I have only seen the set a few times since it came out in 1998, but I always wondered if there was a story here. It is Scott #593-596, showing Wendy Fitzwilliam, Miss Universe from 1998. One can argue these days that beauty pageants are just exploitative.  But sometimes, careers are made and the women go on to have great success.  Judging from wikipedia , it looks like Wendy has done well.  She was "honored by the United Nations and bestowed the title of UNAIDS and UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador for her work in HIV/AIDS education and awareness," and went on to champion AIDS awareness in the Caribbean.  She was Red Cross Ambassador of Youth for the Caribbean, regularly hosts and judges other competitions to give more women visibility in the world, and has had many other honors. She has become a lawyer, entrepreneur and jazz singer....
Read more

Angola classic animals

Image
Here's a set that always brings back memories for me: Angola #362-381.  Here is a mint set that I am listing for the Philatelic Library soon.  The first few stamps in this set were some of the most iconic and common animal topicals when I was growing up.  Almost every starter packet of animals had these included.  100 different animals?  You will probably find the 5c leopard or stately 10c antelope, or the 20c elephant ... or all three of them.  Almost every starter collection I have seen since then that had only a handful of stamps from Angola would have a few of these. The graphics were really special for their time period: crisp and colorful and reasonably accurate portrayals of each animal.  Back then, every color plate had to be minutely aligned, and I don't recall having ever seen any color ink shifted or missing. I have a special fondness for this set, and always set aside the full sets when I find them.  They list for $10 to $12 ...
Read more