February 1, 2005 - Driving towards west in Arizona

We were sorry to leave Debbie and Rob's home; after all, not many places offer a cost-free suite of rooms with complementary meals and transportation thrown in! Still, we wanted to visit San Diego and our old college friend Chris in Los Angeles before turning the rig around and heading back to Virginia. Since getting this far had taken us a month and we had the same distance to travel back home, we felt compelled to move on. Debbie made some great blueberry waffles with whole-wheat flour for our breakfast, after which we bid adieu to Karl as he trotted off to school to duel to the death with fractions, mixed numbers, and decimals. I then packed our things and transferred them back to roughly the appropriate spots in the truck and trailer while Monika rested her ankle, and then we said good-bye to Debbie and trundled off toward I-10.

For some reason I started the day tired (possibly staying up late watching movies?--Naaah.) and Monika could not be an alternate driver very well with her ankle, so we kept the day's drive short. In the end, we drove about 4 hours from Tucson to Yuma, Arizona, on the border of California before stopping for the night. Surprisingly, as we drove west the desert landscape gradually became more green and verdant. We even saw new species of non-sagebrush bushes that looked to me, at least, like they would be edible for cattle or horses, and some areas even boasted irrigated agriculture. The road followed river basins and flats, so there were no slopes to speak of, but there were always ranges of mountains in sight to the left and right. Even these mountains gradually became greener, and I had Monika check me on that to make sure it wasn't my imagination. Some kind of green vegetation was growing on those slopes, but they were too far away to determine exactly what. Outside of Yuma we started seeing roadside flowers in bloom, thousands and thousands of them. The flowers in the median might have been planted by the Department of Transportation like they did back in Virginia, but I'm sure the flowering plants along the shoulders were wild. When we arrived in the RV campground we were greeted by billowing blossoms of orange and yellow (mostly planted, I think), and the proprietor told me they were Desert Daisy. Of course, she could have told me they were Jumbo Mumbo and I would have believed her, but the fact remains that there was a whole lot of growing and flowering going on in that desert as we passed through. I am not sure if we were just there at an unusually wet point or if that happened every year around that time, but it surely made the drive more interesting and enjoyable.

Monika was champing at the bit to leap out of the car and help me set up the trailer like she always did, so I had to get her some crocheting to keep her sitting in the truck while I set up the trailer. Without her help it naturally took a lot longer than normal, but finally I got the trailer all leveled and connected to the electricity and water supplies, after which I helped her limp inside. She started working on Daddy and I first attempted to start working on the journal, but then just fell asleep on the bed for a couple hours, after which we had our usual simple supper of sandwiches.

As nightfall approached I noticed that someone had attached cloth bags to the lower limbs of one of the palm trees just down the lane from us. That puzzled me as I could think only of rather far-fetched reasons that one would want to dress up a palm tree, given that it was a sure bet that you couldn't take it out!

That evening I did manage to bring the journal up to date and worked stitching together new panoramic shots while Monika continued to edit and select pictures to match the text. I also tried to find a station carrying National Public Radio for the news or an "oldies" station but failed to locate either one. Scanning the dial I found that over half of the stations in the area were in Spanish, and the English language stations did not include any NPR or "oldies" ones. Sigh. Although frustrating, the lack of entertainment allowed us to turn in quite early, somewhere around 8 p.m., and get a really good night's sleep.