Out of the desert

Well, I wrote a nice offline blog entry yesterday, but it has disappeared. Don't quite understand this. But will try to reproduce.

I'm now in Davis, CA, having spent the night with a friend. Will stay here again tonight and then put pedal to the metal for home tomorrow.

The past two days have been long slogs of driving. First a whole day again throught the Mojave. Then out of the desert and into the vast central California orchard and vineyard area. I have to say that route 99 from Bakersfield to Sacramento is perhaps the ugliest drive I've ever taken.... imagine 300 miles of Aurora avenue, improved only by the fact that it's freeway so you can get through it a bit faster. Lots of traffic, about half of it trucks. Not a drive I would willingly do again.

Highlights of the drive:

1. A vast windfarm in Tehachapi pass, just outside of the town of Mojave. Thousands and thousands of wind turbins... Google says 5000 but it looked like more to me. I have mixed feelings about this: power for close to half a million homes, but it totally changes the landscape... It's the dominate feature for miles and miles.

2. Some nutcake paid for a 50-foot professionally made banner: "HIGH SPEED RAIL ADVOCATES: EAT S**T AND DIE!" There is a project underway for high speed rail from Sacramento through SF, Fresno, LA, all the way to San Diego. Sounds great to me...

3. At an offramp in Modesto, there was a guy with a "will work for food, anything helps" sign. But he didn't really look like the typical homeless guy. Then I noticed at the bottom of the sign it said "walking from Mexico to Canada". Only got a chance to exchange a few words with him, but he said he'd started a month ago. Who knows if it's true, but I gave him a buck.

4. Trees again, at last.

My latest favorite thing about my ipad: I found out I can just type "starbucks" into the map and it immediately shows me where to get my morning latte!