Zzyzx!

    At breakfast, the McDonald's restaurant was invaded by young Japanese people wearing white facemasks - was it a convention of dental hygienists? Ah, no - these were techies in town for the Consumer Electronics Show. They were accompanied by beautiful models with perfectly manicured nails, all the better to caress the latest smartphones and tablets for hungry-eyed cameras. We left Las Vegas to them...a town in an eternal tug of war between tacky gaudiness and elegance, not to mention some of the worst traffic direction signs we've ever experienced. 

    Once we'd circled back a couple of times and finally found Highway 15, we drove blissfully through the flat plains between soft mountains. We admired what we learned are the Joshua Tree, a.k.a. Yucca Brevifolia. Each is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint, and they are spread evenly across the entire southwest.  I could have taken a photo of each one we saw, and filled an album with interesting shapes. Their seeds used to be distributed by giant sloths, in their poop; now that the sloths are gone, the kangaroo rats and squirrels have to do the job, but they don't spread them quite as widely, apparently. 

    We crossed the Mojave Desert. When is a river not a river? When it is the Mojave River - a dry, wide, sandy riverbed with not a drop of water in it. 

 

    The town of Baker is near Area 51, so we weren't surprised to find parking for aliens. Sure enough, we met a family of them. It's a well-known fact that aliens are responsible for surgical cattle mutilation; it's been a mystery for a long time why they would do that. I believe I have solved that mystery: they make jerky in many delicious flavours, and sell it to buy gas, so they can get home. Mind you, they charge way too much for it; but in their defense, gas is awfully expensive in California.

    Some aliens may have stayed behind: we found a road nearby that might lead to an alien homestead. The word "Zzyzx" probably means "Hello"...no one actually knows, of course. 

 

    We split a lunch at Peggy Sue's 50's Diner, not far east of Barstow; one doesn't burn a lot of calories behind the steering wheel. They told Deb there was a gorilla in the "Diner-saur" park out back, and she searched for it, but without success. 

    Arriving at Bakersfield, Buck Owen's Crystal Palace looked like it might only fascinate a real country music fanatic, so instead we spent a couple of hours in the Woolworths store, which closed down but has been resurrected as a three-story antique mall with a restored vintage 50's Woolsworths lunch counter inside. We gawked at tons of nostalgia items and collectibles, and got a sense of what people here in the southwest owned and decorated their homes with fifty years ago. 

    We've done laundry, and we'll stay with a couchsurfing host for one evening, then cruise northward to find the Giant Sequoias, which, of course, have been lost for a very long time... our CouchSurfing host is Francine Papadimitrakisa, who lives in Bakersfield with her husband Carl, but who grew up in Greece. She teaches yoga and does homestay and tutoring for high school students from South Korea. There are a couple of girls here who were doing their homework with Frannie's help at the dining room table when we arrived. They have a lovely home with an orange tree in the back yard with dozens of ripe oranges on it; Francine says, "our house is your house", so we feel very relaxed and comfortable right now. She's making paella for supper, and we brought good Spanish wine, so we'll have a lovely meal this evening.

Next post: SoCal