Enjoy your stay, pardner!

When we told various friends that we were planning on driving to Willits for one of our stops, they all asked why.  It is certainly not a town known as a tourist destination.  Frankly, it was just the right distance to go that day.  However, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise and a nice stop.

The Pasta Project

We stayed at the Old West Inn, a cute little place where each room was labeled like an old west building.  There was the barber, the Sheriff, the post office, etc.  Our room was the doctor.  We have come to rely on the AAA guides for finding inexpensive but clean and decent places to stay, and this was no exception. The proprietor was clearly proud of his little motel and it seemed to be a family-run business. Always like that!

One somewhat peculiar thing caught our eye, however, at the motel. In the photo of the hotel rooms, you can just see in the foreground a garden chair with something on the seat. When I walked by the chair later in the evening, I noticed that the object was a pizza pan with some big globby ropes of cooked spaghetti drying on it. It had a few little sprinkles of something green on it, too. I think of it as The Pasta Project. No idea at all what that was about. It was gone in the morning.

After we dropped our bags in our doctor room, we went out looking for dinner. We decided to check out a pub that was tucked away down a little walkway off the main street. The walkway opened into a patio area with outdoor tables, and the pub behind that. It turned out they did not serve food, but one of the patrons told us that the BBQ place next door would deliver to the pub. The BBQ place was about to close, but we placed out order just in time and sure enough, our dinner was soon delivered to our table.

We noticed a couple of interesting things about the town.One was that both the pub and  BBQ place operated on a strictly cash basis. Also we picked up a small local paper that was definitely of the radical liberal variety. It seemed to be a very Humboldt County type of place and even had its own tie-dye shop. We speculated that the town might well be heavily dependent on the hemp industry.