Southern California

We left Napa reluctantly as the weather was still warm and summery and it is a relaxing place to be. We paused in the town of Napa which is only ho-hum, struggling a bit by the look of it and not as pretty as tiny Calistoga. Then our final wine stop was at Domaine Carneros for sparkling wine. We spent a very pleasant hour on the sunny terrace with a tasting of 3 of their champagnes and a plate of cheese. The camera batteries had died so our only photos are from below, when e got back to the car.

this has a terrace to drool over

We had a quick transition from the sublime to the awful, being launched into heavy traffic and about 7 interchange transitions to get us around San Francisco and over to Highway 99 toward Bakersfield. Having frittered away the morning we had a 6 hour drive ahead of us and it wasn’t fun but it was interesting. The traffic was relentless with sometimes 12 lanes, 6 in each direction, but beyond the traffic was food production on a scale that I had never imagined. It was like driving on a different planet, one devoted solely to food, and I had visions of it as a penal colony with no time off for good behaviour. We drove through hundreds of miles of orchards, vineyards, and cattle pens. The orchards must smell fantastic when they are in bloom, but the cattle pens most certainly did not. It seemed to be a dairy area rather than beef (there was a Kraft Foods plant) but the visible conditions and smell were enough to make one vegetarian. The vineyards were for raisins, miles of them, with a Sunmaid plant in the middle of it all and other than the obvious orange groves we didn’t know what the other trees were. And the land was completely flat; move over Saskatchewan! We were very happy to get off the road just at dark.

The first hour out of Bakersfield was pretty much the same level of traffic as the previous afternoon but most of that continued south to Los Angeles while we turned east to the real desert and Las Vegas. It was interesting to see Edwards Air Force Base and to go from the mega population area of coastal southern California to the barren emptiness of the south eastern part of the state. And right on the state line, there can’t be a centimetre to spare, is Primm, Nevada with a huge outlet shopping centre and a couple of casinos. There is nothing but empty desert for miles, than bam a consumer/gambling centre, and then desert again. Nuts.

dust blowing

a Joshua Tree

the biggest wind-farm we've ever seen!

in the middle of absolutely nowhere