Driving Day: California

We left the beach this morning and headed east-ish. We had to drive north for way longer than seemed fair, before turning east and going through some of the most unattractive country since the barren mid-west.

The area from around Bakersfield is so odd. It's really dry and desolate, the kind of place where you think nothing should live, and yet, there are all these green farm fields full of grapes, peppers, berries and fruit and nut trees, all watered with purchased, precious water. What a bizarre agricultural system we have. Lots of pistachio and almond trees as well. Lesson #347 on this trip: Pistachios do indeed grown on trees. Now I know.

Oil wells, somewhere around Bakersfield.

I tink these were the almond trees.

So these should be pistachio trees.

 After we passed Bristow, we entered the Mojave Dessert. The scenery here is much more interesting. You feel like you can see forever, even though it's hazy or smokey or something. But you also feel like you drive forever and don't get anywhere. But it was a much more interesting drive then the earlier portion.

And these are Joshua Trees. This completes
our botanical lesson for today.

Mojave Dessert

More of the Mojave.

Math lesson

We ran out of steam just around the California/Arizona line, near Needles, Calif, and not too far from Lake Havasou, in Calizona RV Park (California/Arizona... get it?), the oldest continually operating RV park on Route 66. So far, Route 66 not much to write home about. So that's all I'll say about that. ;-)

Let me just tell you this.. holy crap! It's hot!!! Yeah yeah yeah, it's a dry heat. It's still hot. It's 99 degrees at 8:30 at night in the pitch dark. It's so hot that the water coming out of the tap is nearly body temperature, even though it's coming out of the ground and directly through our hose to the sink. Blech. Hot! Our AC hasn't caught up yet, so it's still warm in here. Dad was teaching the kids math, aka, black jack. We figured it was appropriate since we're only about 100 miles from Vegas. Maybe we should take a detour north and try to earn some more vacation money!

I found this wine at the last campground.
Happy Camper Merlot, in a big
plastic cup. says it all..

Tomorrow: Grand Canyon!