I started the day in Auburn — waiting for the clouds to pass.  Note the pins near the “swiss cheese hole” on the sign on the left:

and this wonderful topiary pin:

On to Sacramento.  This bulbed beauty is at The Distillery:

 

The Gem Auto Wash sign has been missing for awhile.  It used to be a pole sign by the road.  Then, it was replaced with a plastic box sign.  This panel reappeared on the building a few months ago.  It looks to me like this is a replica panel because the shapes don’t quite match up and the “GEM” is not as slanted.  But close enough!  And it’s lit at night.  It don’t know if it has the same colors as it used to:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rickele/8590855113/

Moving on to my final stop of the day.  It was already late afternoon and I should have already been on the highway home (about a six hour drive) but…

There was an open house at Bruce Kennedy’s Bell Plastics shop where he has a big collection of giant fiberglass statues.  I’ve been to the shop many times but some of the statues had been restored and there were a few new additions.

This nice Pep Boys sign is in Bruce’s office:

This Chief Tawonka statue was produced for the Cigarettes R Cheaper chain.  I have a few others at my website here:
http://www.roadarch.com/giants/indians.html#Tawonka

Below:  a 14 foot tall and a 21 foot tall statue side-by-side.  The guy on the right is a Mortimer Snerd statue (that’s what International Fiberglass marketed them as).  Most people refer to these guys as either Alfred E. Neuman statues or Half-Wit statues.  This statue was previously in Flint, Michigan and was just restored here in Hayward.  More about these statues at my website here:
http://www.roadarch.com/giants/ifsnerds.html

The Fireman statue on the left was recently produced for Bruce by Mark Cline.  He has produced a number of these statues using a mold that he made from International Fiberglass’ 14 foot tall Giants to which Cline made his own modifications.  Usually, these Cline statues hold ice cream cones.  Some of them and the original 14 footers appear at my website here:
http://www.roadarch.com/giants/if14men.html

This freshly restored Paul Bunyan statue was originally installed at Dooley’s Hardware in Long Beach, CA:

More about Bruce’s statues at the bottom of this page:
http://www.roadarch.com/giants/ifbunyans4.html

His latest International Fiberglass statue came from a tire shop in Mount Vernon, IL. Bruce got this Miss Uniroyal statue a couple of years ago and the restoration was finished about a week ago.  More about these statues at my website here:
http://www.roadarch.com/giants/ifuni.html

These statues came dressed in a bikini but were also sold with a blouse and skirt for a more modest look.  Her freshly painted secondary outfit is in shrink wrap in Bruce’s shop for now:

I still have a long list of stuff to shoot in the Oakland area so I’ll probably take another trip up north again in a month or so.  For now, it’s back to work on adding the Texas stuff to my website — and then I’ve got about 300 more photos from this trip.

Happy trails,

dj & the dogs