Roy's Motel & Café

Roy Crowl arrived in the eastern Mojave in the 1930s and began building roadside service businesses along the still-young Route 66 alignment that had been federally designated in 1926. Amboy was already a small community — the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad had named the original townsite in 1883 during the construction of its transcontinental line, and a small population of railroad workers, salt-mining operators (the nearby Bristol Dry Lake salt flats have been commercially mined since the 1910s), and a handful of permanent residents lived in the area when Route 66 was routed through town. Crowl recognized that the long, hot, water-scarce stretch of desert between Needles and Barstow made Amboy a natural service stop, and in 1938 he opened the original Roy's gas station and lunch counter.

Crowl's son-in-law Buster Burris married into the family in the 1940s and eventually became the operational anchor of the business. Burris served in World War II and returned to Amboy after the war determined to expand Roy's into a full-service motor court. Through the late 1940s and 1950s he oversaw the construction of the motel buildings — a series of small cinder-block cabin-style rooms arranged in an L-shape behind the main café and office building — and the expansion of the café into a proper sit-down restaurant. By 1959, when the famous Googie sign was installed, Roy's was one of the most substantial roadside operations between Needles and Barstow.

The Googie sign itself is the property's signature feature and is widely regarded as one of the finest surviving examples of late-1950s commercial roadside neon in the United States. The design — a tall vertical pylon supporting a stylized boomerang shape with the word 'ROY'S' in tall block letters and a horizontal arrow pointing toward the property — was executed by a Las Vegas sign-fabrication shop using standard mid-century steel, porcelain, and neon-tube construction. The arrow and boomerang shapes are pure Googie vocabulary, reflecting the same Space Age and atomic-era visual influences that produced contemporary signs at Las Vegas casinos and Los Angeles drive-ins.

Interstate 40 between Needles and Barstow opened in September 1973, and the parallel section of old Route 66 through Amboy lost the through-traffic that had been the town's economic foundation for nearly fifty years. The collapse was sudden and substantial — by some accounts the day-over-day traffic count on the old highway through Amboy dropped by roughly 90% within weeks of the I-40 opening. Roy's gas pumps went from busy round-the-clock service stops to nearly empty. The motel occupancy fell, the café revenue collapsed, and within several years it was clear that the property could no longer sustain full operation.

Buster Burris kept Roy's open in reduced form through the 1970s and 1980s, but the property was visibly declining. The motel rooms were closed at various points; the café operated on increasingly limited hours; the gas pumps were maintained mostly as a service to the handful of remaining Amboy residents and to occasional Route 66 nostalgia travelers who started rediscovering the old alignment in the 1980s and 1990s. The famous neon sign — which had been the most striking visual element of the property — was dark for extended stretches when the neon tubes failed and replacement was not economical.

Burris is generally credited with keeping Roy's from being demolished altogether during this long decline. He refused multiple offers to sell the property for scrap or to allow the buildings to be torn down, and he maintained at least minimal operation of the gas pumps and the small store through periods when the property was generating very little revenue. He died in 2000, after which the property briefly passed through several short-lived ownership arrangements before Albert Okura's 2005 purchase.

Albert Okura — the founder of the Juan Pollo rotisserie-chicken restaurant chain in Southern California, and a serious Route 66 and Americana enthusiast — purchased essentially the entire town of Amboy in 2005 for a reported price of roughly $425,000. The purchase included Roy's Motel and Café, the surrounding gas station and service buildings, the old Amboy School, the small Amboy church, the airfield, several hundred acres of surrounding land, and effectively the entire commercial and infrastructural footprint of the town. Okura's stated motivation was preservation rather than commercial redevelopment — he wanted to ensure that the iconic Roy's complex and the surrounding ghost town infrastructure would not be lost to neglect or demolition.

The preservation work has been ongoing since 2005 and has proceeded in deliberate stages. The most visible early-phase work focused on the Googie sign — the original neon tubes were restored, the steel structure was repainted, the porcelain panels were cleaned and stabilized, and the lighting circuits were rebuilt. The sign was formally relit in a public ceremony in 2010 and has continued to operate in restored form since then, though there have been intermittent outages and ongoing maintenance needs given the harsh desert environment.

The gas station is fully operational under the current management and sells modern unleaded fuel at posted prices. The small store/café building is open intermittently — hours depend on staff availability and visitor volume, and there is no published reliable schedule. The motel rooms themselves are currently not operational as overnight lodging; the rooms have been partially restored but remain closed to overnight guests pending completion of the broader restoration work. Okura died in 2023, but the family has continued the preservation project under the same general approach.

A Roy's visit is fundamentally about photography and atmosphere — the property is not a museum with formal exhibits, and the café and store may or may not be open depending on when you arrive. The single must-do activity is photographing the Googie sign from multiple angles. The classic shot is the head-on view of the sign from the parking lot, with the boomerang and arrow filling the frame against the open desert sky behind. Wider compositions that include the motel office building, the gas pumps, and the surrounding empty desert give a stronger sense of the ghost-town context.

Beyond the sign itself, the property includes the original motel office building (substantial mid-century roadside commercial architecture, photogenic in its own right), the row of cinder-block motel rooms behind the office, the gas station canopy, and various smaller outbuildings. Walking the perimeter of the property — which is generally permitted during daylight hours — takes about 20-30 minutes and reveals the substantial scope of the original operation. The surrounding ghost town buildings (the old school, the church, scattered residential foundations) are nearby and can be photographed from the road, though most are on Okura family land and visitors should respect any posted no-trespassing signs.

Best photography conditions are early morning (the sun lights the east-facing front of the sign and main building) and late afternoon golden hour (warm light on the desert and the sign's west-facing details). Night photography of the lit neon sign is genuinely spectacular when the sign is operating — the dark Mojave sky and minimal ambient light produce dramatic long-exposure compositions. Check before planning a night visit, as the sign is not always operational.

Roy's gas station is one of only a small handful of fuel options on the long stretch of old Route 66 between Needles and Barstow. The pumps sell modern unleaded gasoline at posted prices that are typically higher than urban California fuel prices — the remote location makes fuel delivery expensive — but the convenience for Route 66 travelers is substantial. Pay attention to your fuel level when crossing this section of the Mojave; the next reliable fuel stops are Ludlow (28 miles west) or Needles (78 miles east via I-40 or the parallel old Route 66 alignment).

Water and shade are limited in Amboy. The small store sells bottled water when open, but visitors should not depend on it being available — carry your own water supply, especially in summer when temperatures regularly exceed 110°F and shade is essentially nonexistent outside the buildings. Summer visits (June through September) are physically demanding and require careful timing, generally morning or late-afternoon stops with vehicle air-conditioning running. Winter and shoulder-season visits (October through April) are far more comfortable.

Cell phone coverage is intermittent throughout this section of the Mojave. Major carriers have spotty coverage that may include text-message service but limited or no data. Plan navigation and accommodation arrangements before arriving in Amboy rather than depending on real-time mobile connectivity. The remoteness is part of the experience — Amboy genuinely feels distant from the rest of California — but it does require basic preparation.

Roy's is the anchor stop on the eastern Mojave segment of California Route 66, and most Route 66 itineraries combine it with the other surviving Mojave landmarks. A westbound day-plan from Needles: leave Needles by 8am, drive the old Route 66 alignment through Goffs and across the desert (allow 2-3 hours including stops), arrive Roy's around 11am for late-morning photography and the gas-and-water break (45-60 minutes), continue west to the Amboy Crater trailhead for a 90-minute hike during cooler months, then continue toward Ludlow for late lunch and onward to Barstow for the afternoon.

Eastbound from Barstow, the natural sequence reverses: morning visits to Barstow's Route 66 Mother Road Museum and the Calico Ghost Town, lunch in Barstow, then the drive east via I-40 to Ludlow (28 miles), the surface road south to old Route 66 and east through Amboy (28 miles more), with Roy's as a late-afternoon photography stop in the warm Mojave light. Continuing east to Needles is another 78 miles and typically a sunset or after-dark drive in summer; in cooler months it's a comfortable late-afternoon continuation.

For travelers who want to spend serious time in the area, the closest viable overnight bases are Needles (78 miles east, multiple motels and chain hotels along I-40) and Barstow (55 miles west, larger selection of hotels including major chains). Ludlow has a small motel and gas station 28 miles west of Amboy but is itself essentially a service stop rather than a destination. Camping is possible on BLM land in the surrounding Mojave Trails National Monument, but requires self-sufficiency in water and supplies.