Roy’s Motel and Cafe Sign – Amboy, California
A Sign in the Middle of Nowhere
There are not many places left on Route 66 that look the way Route 66 is supposed to look. Amboy, California is one of them, and Roy’s Motel and Cafe is the reason most people pull over. The sign is 50 feet tall, boomerang-shaped, and built in the Googie style that defined mid-century roadside architecture in California. It went up in 1959 and has been visible from miles out on the flat desert highway ever since. You see it long before you reach it.
Roy Crowl opened the business in 1938 as a gas station along what was then the primary east-west highway in the country. He and his wife Velma had first arrived in Amboy in 1924 when their car broke down on the way to Los Angeles. Unable to pay for repairs, they stayed. Fourteen years later Roy opened the station, and through the 1940s he and his son-in-law Herman “Buster” Burris expanded it into a full operation: cafe, garage, auto court, running 24 hours a day seven days a week. By the 1950s Amboy had a population of 700, with a significant portion of them working at Roy’s.
The sign and the Googie-style reception building both went up in 1959, right at the peak of the operation. Then Interstate 40 opened in 1972 and bypassed this stretch of Route 66 entirely. The traffic disappeared almost overnight. Amboy went from a functioning desert town to something closer to a ruin over the span of a few years. The sign stayed.
In 2005 the entire town, including Roy’s, was purchased by Albert Okura, a Southern California preservationist who pledged to restore the property and keep its Route 66 character intact. The gas station was eventually reopened. Restoration work on the cafe and cottages has been ongoing. The sign was restored in 2019. Whatever Amboy is becoming, Roy’s is the anchor it is becoming around.
Roy’s is the reason people stop, but it is not the only thing worth seeing in Amboy. Amboy Crater rises off to the southwest, a cinder cone with a trail to the rim, and a pair of stone lions sit just up the National Trails Highway, guarding a driveway that no longer leads anywhere. All three are within a few minutes of each other, which is really what makes Amboy worth the detour. It is less a town now than a single strange stop on the Mother Road.
Know Before You Go
- Region: Southwest United States / Mojave Desert
- Location: Amboy, California — along National Trails Highway, the former Route 66
- Address: 87520 National Trails Highway, Amboy, CA 92304
- Coordinates: 34.5583° N, 115.7455° W
- Cost: Free to stop and photograph
- Hours: The sign and exterior are accessible any time. Gas station hours vary.
- Managed By: VistAmboy / Private — Albert Okura Estate
- Attraction Type: Roadside Attraction / Historic Landmark
Cell service is limited or nonexistent in Amboy. This stretch of the Mojave is remote and the heat is serious. Bring more water than you think you need. If the gas station is open, top off before continuing in either direction.
My Visit
We set out early from camp to beat the heat. Arriving at Roy’s in the early morning, the sun was already bright and the silence was the kind that makes you half expect a tumbleweed to roll across the road in front of you. The place had that quality that good desert stops have, where the stillness feels earned rather than empty.
When we visited in 2020 Roy’s had just changed hands. The new owners had plans to bring it back to life but the work was clearly just beginning. The motel cabins looked like they had been sitting untouched for decades. The cafe was operating as more of a gift shop and limited convenience store, but the woman behind the counter was happy to talk. She told us about the new ownership and what they were hoping to do with the property, and you could hear the genuine belief in it. Whether it would all come together was another question, but the intent was real.
We took our photos, spent some time with the sign, and then headed across the street to hike Amboy Crater. The two stops belong together. If you are making the drive out here for one, you should plan on doing both.
Roy’s is one stop on a stretch of Route 66 that rewards slowing down. If you want more places like it, Poston Butte in Florence, Arizona is a free hike to a 14-foot masonry pyramid built to honor the Father of Arizona, and Sunspot, New Mexico is part solar observatory, part abandoned military installation sitting at 9,000 feet in the Sacramento Mountains.
If you want to see everything in the Roadside Attractions section, the full list is here.
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