El Centro

Today started the same as everyday, a desert walkabout, and then back to camp for a kick back and relax. Our rain last night didn't amount to much, but it did settle the dust around camp, but no sign of water in the washes. But, we did hear one crash of thunder off in the distance.

No real colourful sunrise but the clouds in the sky added a little drama to the situation so there is that. Yesterday I did manage to round up a hummingbird feeder so I shanghai'd a cup or two of sugar from Brenda's baking supply and mixed up a feed for my hummingbird friends. We haven't seen any around, since we arrived here at American Girl Wash, which is strange, but maybe now the grub is on the hook they will drop by.

Once we got all that out of the way a trip to Costco was on the agenda. We needed to restock our meat locker here at DPA and when we can't get our usual Long Run Ranch Beef down the road from Dogpound, we usually default to Costco. They seem to have good cuts of beef wherever we go, and for a change the Costco in El Centro also had pork chops with the bone-in. Those have been non-existent at our local Costco back at DPN, so they will be a special treat. Yuma, just across the California/Arizona border has a Marine base and we hear some fast moving jets going by but they usually are above the clouds or gone by quick so I miss any decent shots. However I did spot this pair over the desert early this afternoon, and I expect this was a refueling training mission happening.

And shortly afterwards this fellow gave us a pass by just checking out the RV'ers I expect.

Cloudy all day today, and then it was sunset time. Some places you go folks are lining up to shoot the sunset, but here it just us, and it almost seems a waste for Charlie Russell to waste all that time painting that sunset just for us two lone Canucks. But, dang it, I am going to enjoy it all the more, if it's just for us.

Now if there is one thing I have learned about picturin' sunsets or sunrises, you better hang tight and stay for the whole show cause something might come along that blows the already spectacular images you got clear out of the picture. The moon popped through the clouds for this cameo for about 3 or 4 seconds and I was pretty happy to be sitting there waiting for it. Not a hard job, it was a beautiful night and the entire event was pretty decent as the time-lapse shows but this image made the day for me.

Down the Road from Dogpound

This morning started like most down here in the desert, I was up and out for a walkabout, but today it was just a short one, enough to see a few favourite spots and gather a picture or two for the journal. I still haven't figured out how to actually make blogger make paragraphs yet so the pictures serve as spacers to keep the words from all jumbling together.

This place outside of Bouse is probably my favourite spot from a desert rambling point of view, there is just so much variety here and so many hills and washes to explore it would take an entire winter to see it all.

So that said, we will be back here, but there are other places to see, and trails to wander, plus we have been here for 14 days and although we haven't yet run out of water and our tanks aren't full, that is probably not far in the future so we headed into the local RV Park, and dumped the tanks that needed dumping, and filled those that needed filling, and pointed Dogpound Anywhere southward.

Whoa, that is a kind of crooked picture, but it is what it is. We have changed deserts, left the Sonoran Desert and moved across the Colorado River into the Mojave Desert, to a familar spot to many, alongside American Girl Wash. We will call California home for a while now, although we can still jump back across the border into Yuma, Arizona for cheaper fuel and most of our shopping, although one day we might run west to El Centro just to exercise our Costco membership.

Pretty decent sunset to welcome us to our new digs tonight. The little screen in the bottom hints that if it works out I might have a time-lapse of the sunset as well. But while I am waiting for that to happen I thought I might make a comment on the roads we have encountered on our journey south this year. Now I frequent some forums that folks using the Alaska Highway, the Cassiar, and the Dempster chat on all year round, but especially the summer. Now the Alaska Highway crosses some difficult terrain up in the Yukon, muskeg and permafrost so it has a reputation for having some horrendous frost heaves on it, and I can vouch the veracity of those claims. But it seems to me that the highways down in the States suffer from some kind of heat rash, that is equally as hard on vehicles. We have driven some that had us hurling up and down, lurching from pothole to pothole, or heat blister to heat blister. It appears that our American hosts suffer from the same kind of infrastructure deficit we Canadians do. Just makes me curious where we are spending our tax dollars cause I am sure way back when, we paid lower taxes and we had better roads. All that said Highway 78 out of Blythe heading towards Brawley, a lonely two lane highway was pretty near the best road we have been on since heading down the road from Dogpound.

Doing Chores

Today was laundry day for Dogpound Anywhere, it is a pretty efficient operation here though, four loads, sorted, washed, dried, folded and stowed back away with clean bedding put on, including the almost 50 minutes of drive time it took just a few minutes longer than two hours start to finish. And until about 20 minutes ago that was my only picture for the day.

Not sure what the attraction was but it was a multi-species mob scene there in front of the laundry. But what looked like a pretty blah sunset tonight surprised us at the last minute with a pretty spectacular show of colour as Ol' Sol slipped off into the west.

And then I captured this while the iPhone was doing the time-lapse above.

Oh and today I had to restock my meds, that took about 10 minutes, but let me know we had been on the road for 4 weeks already. Time flys when you are having fun I guess.