Randsburg

Our enthusiasm for exploring the area has definitely decreased since it got hot, but the hot weekend days are long, and very dull if we just stay home. Rocket Boy's suggestion today was to visit the museum in Randsburg, a small former mining town maybe 20 miles from Ridgecrest. He called and found out they were open until 4pm. I wasn't overwhelmingly thrilled with the idea, but it didn't involve swim diapers, so I said OK.

We went just a little before noon, with the idea of possibly finding food in the town of Randsburg as well. We didn't really know what we were getting into -- is this a ghost town? do people still live there? We took 395 south to a little road that led west briefly to our destination.

Randsburg does seem to be inhabited, although I'll bet it doesn't cost much to buy a ramshackle old house there. The downtown has been "preserved" so that the dozen or so buildings look something like they must have 100 years ago. We drove past a General Store and a few antique stores to the Desert Museum, where we parked. It looked a bit small to accommodate our twin stroller, so we each carried a baby on in.

We were hoping for something like the Trona Museum, but the Randsburg Museum is much smaller, only 2 rooms. Nice displays, though, including a glass case full of pale purple glassware (the glass has manganese in it, which turns it purple when exposed to the sun), and lots of cases of rocks. The babies were not, as Rocket Boy put it, on their best museum behavior. There was a lot of running around, banging on glass cases, and yelling. Baby A liked the case of purple glass, because it included a set of glass bookends in the shape of dogs. He kept running over to that section of the case and pointing, and I would say "Yes, those are dogs! What does the dog say? Woof woof!" and then he'd go look at something else, and then he'd come back and point at the dogs again and we'd go through the whole thing again.

Eventually Baby A ran out the front door of the museum, and I thought "Fine, go outside where you can't cause trouble." So immediately he discovered a receptacle for people's cigarette butts, selected a long white one, and put it in his mouth. God! Since my worst nightmare is that the babies will someday smoke, this was very upsetting. I grabbed it out of his mouth, threw it away, and carried him back into the museum.

Very soon we decided it was time to go, and we walked down the street a little ways, each of us holding on to a baby by his shirt collar. The man running the museum had recommended the General Store as a place to get food, so we went in there, but it didn't look baby friendly, no highchairs, etc. We'll come back sometime when the boos are older. We don't have to do EVERYTHING now.

We packed ourselves back into our car and drove to a Mexican restaurant in Inyokern where we had a nice lunch, and then we came home and did laundry. And thus another day in Ridgecrest passed by.