Sunday, 17th - A Pleasant Surprise

Sunday, 17th - A Pleasant Surprise

Our Maggie made herself right at home!

We have settled in at the RV Park at the Naval Air Facility, El Centro, CA (the winter home of the Blue Angels) and we will be here for two weeks.   We expected to be sitting in a kitty litter box with RVs lined up side by side despite the reviews of the place being 4 out of 5.   It was awesome to discover the sites have cement pads and are very large, there are trees, and there are grassy common areas.  We have a corner lot at an intersection with an especially large open area on both sides.  Oleander bushes provide some privacy on the door side and we back up to an agricultural area behind the fence that is the boundary of the base.  We are very happy with the site!  Every one seems super friendly and the camp host stopped to tell us about all the perks of staying here.   Within and hour of arriving we had four people stop to welcome us and to warn us about which sites to avoid walking the dog by because of aggressive dogs.  One in particular is a German Shepherd-Coyote mix and not very friendly!   

Now, the downside - no TV signal, no WIFI.  Both are available down the street in the  park recreation lounge so I will probably be going down there to work on this journal during the day.  If that signal isn’t strong enough, then I’m sure the base library will work.  Shall see how it goes.  

We did get up and get moving about our regular time this morning - 9am.  We ALL slept like logs last night.  I don’t think any of even got up in the night to pee, we were so tired.   

We climbed the mountain on CA 58 to Tehachapi Pass.  As we climbed out of the valley we started seeing trees next to stream beds whose leaves were just turning gold - something we have already experienced in Sparks where we raked the leaves and bagged them for disposal already!  Tehachapi has huge wind turbine fields which tells me the wind blows there all the time and it’s not a place I’d like to live despite the fact it is a nice town.  

Dropping down off the mountain into the Mojave Desert is always a downer.  We are desert people - we live in the high desert of Nevada - but the Mojave in this part of the country is just plain ugly.  The only redeeming features as far as we are concerned are the Joshua Trees.  Everything else is brown on brown this time of year and very depressing!  

We connected with US395 and headed south at Kramer Junction.  No rest areas along the way available for our lunch break.  We usually find a shopping center parking lot when that is the case, but today we spotted an even better venue.  Next to the town park in Adelanto is the Little League field.  Hmmm....empty parking lot big enough to pull into (and get out of), grass for the dog to run in, restrooms, and bleachers for a makeshift table!   Voila!   

We turned east on I-10 and passed Palm Springs and the other high end towns along the way with street names like “Gene Autry Drive,” “Bob Hope Avenue,” and “Gerald Ford Drive.”  There were lots of wind turbines in the valley along with solar arrays that we hadn’t seen last time we were in the area several years ago.  It would be a really nice area to live except it is very pricey and it sits on the San Andreas Fault!  

Going south  from I-10 toward El Centro we drove for fifty miles or so along the west side of the Salton Sea.  Now, that area is also pretty ugly for the most part - desert scrub. and dirt.  Awful.  Then, about half way, the agricultural area started and there were date palm orchards and  green fields full of lettuce.   The color of the fields matched my face as we bumped along the road as if we were driving on a washboard.  At one point and I had to have Roger pull over so I could get some Pepto tablets out of the RV!  Between the queasy stomach and the bouncing bladder I almost reached the tipping point and critical mass.  Fortunately Rog found a place big enough to pull over before I lost control!  I was surprised it didn’t bother Maggie but maybe her meds helped her combat the motion sickness as well as her high anxiety.  

I hope to post this and yesterday’s entry tomorrow (Monday) and then be able to get back on schedule.  For now we are glad to be done driving for a while and will sit and enjoy the 70 degree weather and sunshine - the reason for coming!!!