The Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, CA on Route 66 - wow
Bagdad Café: A Route 66 Icon in the Heart of the Mojave Desert
The Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, CA is one of those iconic stops on Route 66 that will live in your memory and bring back a smile when you recall it. This used to be a cafe and even a motel many years ago and is now just a cultural icon of epic proportion in part thanks to the movie Bagdad Cafe.
Originally opened in 1958 as the Sidewinder Café, this small desert diner sat along the original alignment of U.S. Route 66. When Interstate 40 rerouted traffic away from Route 66, many roadside businesses disappeared—but Bagdad Café survived.
Its claim to global fame came in 1987 with the release of the cult-classic film Bagdad Cafe (also known in Germany as Out of Rosenheim). The movie was filmed on location at the café and transformed this quiet desert diner into an international tourist destination—especially popular with European visitors.
What will greet you today is just an incredible number of stickers and memorabilia plastered to the wall of the place but, even more, some warm and friendly characters that share some of the story of this place.
Even before we went inside a resident of the area greeted us outside but once we had entered, team member Marion greeted us and shared the history of the place. According to Marion once summer arrives busloads of tourists come through the place. It is particularly a popular stop for German and French tourists as the movie Bagdad Cafe has really taken hold there.
During our stop the Bagdad Cafe wasn’t a cafe due to a fire (we keep hearing similar stories along our adventure - someone needs to sell a lot of fire extinguishers along Route 66) but they are hoping to reopen the kitchen eventually.
YouTuber Wonderhussy helped create an event that raised enough money to put a new roof on the facility and also repair the ceiling inside - Sarah is a good person and we’ve put a link to her channel here. We saw remnants of that gathering but somehow missed the shrine to her inside.
For some time Andrea Pruett was the caretaker at the Bagdad Cafe and saw it through good times and rough times. YouTuber Wonderhussy described going into the cafe realizing that Pruett was sleeping in the cafe and catching the water that flowed through a tired ceiling in anything she could. Through Wonderhussy’s followers they raised enough money to replace the roof and do some other work. Unfortunately Andrea Pruett passed away on January 13, 2026 but the present staff seems well suited to keeping things going.
There is a good selection of Route 66 shirts, hats, hoodies and other goodies available at the Bagdad Cafe. There is a lot of parking outside so this would be a good stop with an RV and definitely worth the visit.
The 4.1 mile long stretch of road is actually a driveway that Margaret Orcutt convinced the government to build when Route 66 was being created. Later Motot Trend used it for testing cars for their magazine.
Mrs. Orcutt’s Driveway
The history of this is more fun than the actual experience but Mrs. Orcutt’s driveway is still a story worth telling and we got to drive on it.
The story goes that when the Interstate was being built Margaret Orcutt was approached to have her house bought out and the road brought straight through the property. She wanted no part of this and actually out-stubborned the U.S. government. Eventually they acquiesced and there’s a curve in I-40 around her land.
But, even better, they built a driveway from Route 66 to her home and that driveway is 4.1 miles long. In fact, it’s 4.1 miles of almost perfectly flat, straight pavement. If you have any motor oil in your blood as I do, you’ll know that this is an incredible temptation to anyone who loves cars and, among those people, Motor Trend Magazine came a-callin’
The publication used the piece of asphalt to test cars including one purportedly hitting 204 miles per hour on the stretch of land. There was also a Cadillac Seville that lost a bumper at over 100 miles per hour. Yikes.
Margaret Orcutt passed away in 1987 and now the road is not one on which I would drive 100 miles per hour but we did reach the end even with trailers in tow. Orcutt’s house is melting back into nature but the stories are still quite alive.
