Lone Pine, CA

Lone Pine’s motto might be “You Won’t Be Lone and You Won’t Pine.” In summer, Main Street was jumping and I overheard French, Italian, and German at our hotel, plus a Slavic language I couldn’t name. I was asked for directions no fewer than three times. And I dispensed insider American-only knowledge about orange-lidded coffee canisters containing Decaf to a French family baffled by the many choices at the breakfast buffet. Ah, America, the Land of Unlimited Possibilities and Unlabeled Breakfast Options.

We want to return to Lone Pine, not just to visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pines. We skipped a visit to the former detention camp Manzanar, where Japanese-Americans were unjustly interned during WWII. And we could have spent a few days exploring the Alabama Hills, fascinating rock formations featured as a setting in over 300 Hollywood films. But it was about a hundred degrees in July. On our rest day, we toured the Lone Pine Film Museum. Here we saw relics of the many movies set in the scenery around Lone Pine. Westerns were especially popular. JG saw a genuine Hopalong Cassidy cereal bowl, featuring Hoppy and his horse, Topper. He used to have one just like it. I loved all the horse lore. Horse wrangling for the Hollywood folks was a huge business in Lone Pine. Those were real cowboys and real Indians riding and falling off real horses in the days before CGI effects.