Yuma to Palm Springs

We got to Yuma after 1,615 miles of driving. It wasn't bad really, well, not after the sun finally came up. You saw from the pictures I posted earlier the most interesting parts of the landscape - what I should include though is the REST of the landscape. Which is flat and about as sparse as a teenage beard. I haven't seen a tree in days I feel like. I mean, I've seen palm trees, but those don't count in my book. Those are more like exotic apparitions, mirages in the desert landscape.

In Yuma we visited Venessa, my college roommate, her husband and her two kids, Aloria and Justus. Each of her kids are 2-3 months older than mine, but I missed the boat with her current pregnancy ;) She's 6 months along with a baby girl, and you'd think she was walking around with nothing more than a beach ball under her shirt for all the rest of her body showed her baby bearing. We had a great time, she made a wonderful homemade soup, waffles for breakfast and a veggie yakisoba noodle stirfry for lunch. We stayed up to the late late hour of 10 pm talking and then passed out from travel exahustion. Bed never felt so good!

The next morning we let the kids run around together. They dynamic was comical. Kate and Aloria got along wonderfully. They played with dolls and puppies and castles. The boys, however, were like rivals. One would grab a toy from the other and the other would run into the first one in retaliation. Not to get the toy back, but just to prove his manliness. Then one would run into the other one and the other would fall down and cry while giving the one who pushed him over a death glare. The expressions on those boys were hilarious. They were like little frenzied balls that we couldn't keep apart, but couldn't force to get along. Like friends, but... not. The 18 -24 month age range is such a strange phase.

We spent some time playing in their apartment's play area outside and snapped a million adorable pictures, which I'll post tomorrow after Kristen downloads the onto her computer. There was sand again, but thankfully Jack bypassed the diaper/sand extravenganza of yesterday.



Then, we were back on the road again. It went quickly and the landscape, while constantly desert, changed dramatically every 10-30 miles, so things kept interesting. We came into California on I-8 and after passing a flirtatous older boarder patrol man we found ourselves in the middle of the rolling sand dunes. Kristen said it looked exactly like the desert outside of Cairo, but they only lasted a few minutes before we were back to scrubby, dry landscape that was dotted with half dead bushes. We turned north on highway 111 and jumped off the road at Niland to see "Salvation Mountain", which, I'm told is in the movie "Into the Wild" - but I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know. I stayed at the car with the kids while Kate napped and Jack played with his toes, and Kristen went inside and took pictures of a Dr. Suessesque cave of art hidden underneath a painted adobe exterior. I wasn't there, so I can't do it justice in description, but I'm excited to share the pictures with you!





Fron Niland we drove along the Salton Sea, which is a 35 mile long salt water body, is incredibly fascinating. It was formed in 1905 when intense flooding broke down a dam holding back the Colorado river broke and began dumping the entire river into this gigantic sink hole in the California desert. It completely submerged the town of Salton and quite a bit of an indian reservation before they were able to stop the flow 2 years later. The result is a beautiful, shimmering pool of deadish water that has some trouble not smelling and keeping a pH that doesn't kill off the fish that live in it. Back in the 50's it was aparently "the" place for Hollywood stars to go and waterski and vacation, so several mansions and resorts were built around its' shore, but I didn't see any of that, and they're aparently all deserted. All we saw were a bunch of trailer parks and a few run down shells of who knows what. After we passed north of it, we drove past some date orchards - aka, a bunch of palm trees :) And then we passed into Indio, CA to hop on I-10 and ate In 'n Out in Thousand Palms with Kristen's uncle Mike and then we went back to his condo for the night. I'll update more about that later though, because I'm just about dying of exahustion! I just wanted to write this all out while I could :) G'nite!