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Manuscripts
Journal of a car trip to California
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- Description
- Journal of a car trip from Washington State to California with brief visits to Mexican border cities, dated September 8, 1933 to February 8, 1934, and illustrated with 163 original snapshots, commercial photographs, and postcards. Travels occur in a 1927 Chevrolet and are primarily in California; many journal entries and photographs depict visits with the travelers' friends or family. The journey begins in the Everett, Washington area and continues to Eastern Washington with stops in Soap Lake, Spokane, and Walla Walla; the travelers then continue into Oregon, visiting Pilot Rock, Ukiah, Mount Vernon, Blue Mountains Hot Springs, and Austin. Entries for Northern California include a history and description of mining in Calaveras County and images of a large maritime hangar at Sunnyvale. In the Los Angeles area, the travelers take daytrips to the San Gabriel Valley and to the South Bay, San Pedro, and Santa Ana; the bulk of L.A.-area entries describe the aftereffects of the March 1933 Long Beach earthquake, depicted with numerous commercial photographs. Other sites visited in Southern California include Riverside, Colton, San Bernardino, Redlands, Palm Springs, and the Coachella Valley, where the diarist provides brief descriptions of a Native American trading post and of date tree cultivation; also, the Salton Sea, Plaster City, Descanso, Lake Cuyamaca and dam, Julian, Santa Ysabel, Ramona, and Lakeside. In the San Diego area, places traveled to include Escondido, Encinitas, La Jolla, Point Loma, Sunset Cliffs, Coronado Island and aviation base, Balboa Park's Indian Village and zoo, Old Town San Diego, El Cajon, Warner Hot Springs, and a few Native American reservations in the Rincon and Pala area; longer entries describe fruit orchards, the history of missions and Junipero Serra, and Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, with several photographs of the Casa de Estudillo, the tourist attraction known as "Ramona's Marriage Place." The journal also includes several side trips to Mexican border cities, with brief entries for Mexicali and Tecate and lengthier descriptions of two visits to Tijuana. Journal is a bound scrapbook; entries and captions are handwritten in ink, and photographs and postcards are glued to pages.
