What a wonderful drive.
The moment we left Mesa the temperatures
reached 90 after a whole season
of lower than normal temps.
First stop:
And across from us was the "Good Ship Quartzsite"?
By the time we got to Quartzsite and
then Indio, CA, it was in the 90s also.
Really, that is too warm for us.
We headed up the mountains to sunshine
and under 80. Not bad.
Got to see Joshua Trees with new blooms.
And California Poppies popping up all over.
This is looking at mine tailings surrounded by poppies..
Had read about the train derailment on Tehachapi Pass in January.
Kept our eyes open and found they hadn't got it totally cleaned up.
Further along, we stayed at an air museum campground. Airplanes, of course.
But we were lucky that from our RV seats we could see over the Waymo test
track fence where driverless semi trucks were going thru testing.
We took advantage of two farm overnighters with the group Harvest Host.
The first was a wine grower / cherry orchard. A few leaves on the grapes
and a few green orbs on the cherry plants.
The bees were busy pollinating.
The owner provided us with "boozie cherries"
that were last year's cherries in rum. Nice.
We learned a bit about the different ways of farming.
One field of wine grapes grew these by
head-trained vines - no running the branches along a wire.
But then cherries were espaliered - run along a wire.
Anything to keep from time-consuming ladder
access to harvest cherries.
The second farm was a rice grower -
unfortunately, nobody was around but
we understand that here the rice fields were flooded
as in paddies.
Unfortunately as wet as this spring has been, the farmer
hasn't been able to get the fields seeded, etc.
When it is time to harvest they gather and
put in grain bin (silos) and with fans drying the rice.
We were able to pick up rice from a self-service kiosk.
We were still wearing shorts in the nice California weather.....
UNTIL we headed into Oregon and the rain started
within 5 miles. Ugly. Back into long pants.
Another stop there was snow forecast overnight.
Didn't happen where we were camped
but we met up with roadside snow in a few places.
Our last day out we had hardly "any" rain.
So a very pleasant run home.
(Note: the previous day had set a record of being
the coldest in Seattle for 100 years.
Did we really want to head home?)
We managed to work around the possible error in the
gas level indicator sitting on Empty. We put fuel in -
and all was better.
We figured out how to pull into the correct gear
with the gear indicator gone.
No accidental drops into Reverse. WE'll get that figured out.
One shattered fog lamp glass on the.
CMax but the lamp is working.
HOME IN TIME TO SEE THE TULIPS
