To Cancun?
No?
Frisco?
A little less traditional for spring break, but why not?
And so we picked up our rental car and bid Vegas farewell. Actually, Vegas can fare as it damn well pleases. I felt like an animal escaping a zoo.
'Twas a lengthy and largely uneventful drive. Driving on the right side of the road is easier to adjust to than driving on the left side of the car. I don't know how many times I turned the wipers on to make a turn.And I never really got used to looking to the right for the rear-view mirror.
Leaving the artifice of Vegas quickly reveals the harsh reality of the Mojave Desert. The Mojave Desert, named for the local people, is defined by the Joshua Tree. What a great name for an album. What? That preachy do-gooding pretentious wanker. What? Sorry, I thought you said Sting.
If you like the look of Yucca Brevifolia (that's ET for Joshua Tree - he was a botanist wasn't he? And one hell of a telecommunications engineer to boot) then you'll love the Mojave Desert. If that's your bag, then chances are you'll also like Enya.
Besides Yuccas, our desert trek was made very slightly interesting by the sight of substantial snow on the distant mountains, and by passing somewhere within the vicinity of Edwards Airforce Base - where Frank Zappa lived as a teenager during the late 1950s. In fact, he wasn't just living as a teenager in some bizarre fantasy - he was an actual teenager at that time. Later in life he wasn't a teenager.
Knowing that Frank Zappa once lived somewhere near by but not being sure exactly in which direction might not seem very interesting - but such is the nature of driving through a large desert.
The desert becomes less well, deserty, around the town of Mojave, where the land rises to the Tehachapi mountains. The pass through the Tehachapi mountains is notable for wind turbines. Lots of wind turbines. No, really, I'm talking LOTS of wind turbines. Like, 5000 wind turbines.
(Take what you think is a lot of wind turbines, multiply it by, like, 10, say, and that's how many wind turbines there are ... with thanks to Chris Lang).
Driving through the Tehachapi pass provided some beautiful vistas (you may know these as "views", because you're not a pretentious bastard like me) - which I enjoyed alone as the family slept.
On the other side of the Tehachapi mountains we descended into the San Joaquin Valley, from which is produced a significant portion of the United States' agriculture. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of plantations as far as the eye can see. Whilst mostly plantations, we also passed one dairy farm - and quite a dairy farm it was. We were alerted by the odour, which we immediately blamed on Connick. But then there were cows. I don't know how may cows, but certainly in the thousands. Oh, to be a manufacturer of three legged stools and wooden buckets in the San Joaquin valley.
The California Aqueduct follows the interstate for much of the trip through the San Joaquin valley. I didn't see Donald Duck at Disneyland, so I took great interest in the California Aqueduct. Over 1100 kms of concrete lined channel. By gosh that's quite something.
Despite such an impressive delivery system, the region has clearly not been without its water problems - both climatic and political. Quite a few dead plantations stood with signs proclaiming "Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl" (or something like that).
The road down into San Francisco was lovely, through velvety rolling hills. The road surface, on the other hand, was appalling. I doubt that local drivers would ever know if they had a flat tyre. The surface really made the car rattle and hum ... now there's a good album title. What? Not again. That sermonising Irish git. What? Not Bob Geldof?
One of the pleasures of west coast driving is a near-total disregard for red lights. The right turn of red is allowed by law, but to speed the flow of traffic I took some further liberties with this. Probably lucky I didn't have far from the motel to the Hertz drop off. I also noticed many intersections where all arriving traffic faces STOP signs. I'm not sure who gets right of way, so, again, probably lucky I restricted most of my driving to highways.
Did I mention driving across the Golden Gate bridge? Turns out I didn't - it was a different bridge. But we did cross it a couple of times on the hop-on-hop-off bus later in our trip.
But that, as they say in the classics, is not for now.
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