Desert: Day One

What an interesting day! Goodbye to the Pacific Ocean and 64 degrees early this morning, and into the triple-digit desert a couple of hours later. Desert portrayed itself in several different ways: boulders upon boulders, scrub brush, sand dunes, and big red rock formations.

Scrub: just along the horizon,
you might be able to see the big black fence
along the American-Mexican border:

In addition to the big black fence, there were several helicopters buzzing around, and not just in the figurative sense. I saw one helicopter buzz (nose-first) four people climbing in amongst some giant boulders in the desert. Illegal entry? Drug cartel? We will never know.

Once outside of San Diego, Gillian exclaimed, "Oh, no! Fruit!" "What??!" "I have fruit in the car! They will confiscate my fruit!" It seems that she had some really nice fruit that one of the museum docents would give to her out of his back yard: oranges, peaches, etc. At the California/Arizona border, cars get stopped and must dispose of all fruit. In addition to Gillian's fruit, I had just bought a bag of clementines. So rather than toss all of this good fruit away, we sat there driving along, eating as much of our fruit as we could possibly manage. Picture Lucy & Ethel of the Vitamin C variety. And you know what? Apparently Arizona doesn't care if you bring fruit from California. At border control, all he did was stick his head in our window and ask if we were US citizens. And he didn't even wait for our answer before waving us on. Us, feeling green from so much fruit...

An observation: Gillian and I decided during our massive fruit intake that the back yard fruit had a better flavor than the orchard "mass-grown" fruit. Even thought the backyard fruit was much more difficult to peel.

Sand

Dateland, Arizona

Gillian put Dateland, AZ on our itinerary. I was really happy about this! I eat dates, but had not a clue about date growing. This was a really pretty date farm. We wandered out to the rows of trees. There was a huge amount of buzzing going on around our heads - at first I though they were mosquitoes, but they were really some sort of fly, smaller than a house fly and larger than a fruit fly. ALL OVER OUR FACES, EARS, NOSES, EYES. And then, we two traipsed through some sort of burr growth. Little, tiny burrs that stuck on our pants, and then when we tried to pick them off, they broke into little needles like cactus stickers. Ouch! And I am here to tell you that using one's library card to scrape the burrs off does not work. FYI.

I think I was swatting flies.

Where your date pudding originates:

At last, late afternoon saw us driving towards Sedona, Arizona.
What a pretty place!

We two thought we would take a short hike before going to our Bed & Breakfast. And what a great photo opp! There were several takes for this photo. Set timer, push the button, RUN DOWN THE HILL (without tripping) in less than 10 seconds, turn, pose, and smile. Take two. Take three...

Finally!

Tomorrow sees us heading north/northwest.
And east.
Hey! Wait a minute, Gill!