Sunday November 30th 2016
Gerald needs to 'go into the office' for a grueling week - this time 'the office' is in Riverside, California so we are up at 4 am and heading out to the airport 30 minutes later.
We flew Southwest to Phoenix and then on to Ontario airport in Riverside. It was my first time flying Southwest and it was a really good experience. Our first flight was on a 737-800, designed for 215 passengers but we had only 49. We were literally told to pick our own row and spread out for this super smooth 2 and half hour flight into Phoenix. The flight staff were very friendly and of course quite laid back, nothing was too much trouble for them. We got to watch the horizon glowing with the early stages of sunrise as we started our descent into Phoenix.
Two hours in Phoenix airport gave us a chance to grab a bite for breakfast and then head out on exploring trip to stretch our legs. There are some very impressive glass etchings of historical aircraft along the windows of the skybridge between two terminals. The are in pairs in wing shaped glass panels and are drawings with technical data, along with some poetry and prose. I later found out that these drawings are etch on the glass by a high powered CO2 laser instead of the usual sand-blasting. This process actually fractures the glass and breaks it at a microscopic level which allow light to pass through it in the same way as it passes through a prism - this means that the drawings sparkles because of the colors as you pass by them.
We picked up a Corolla at Ontario airport and I didn't recognize it as a Corolla, it looks absolutely nothing like my little blue Corolla that took us on so many adventures and commutes between Colorado and Montana - it is so much bigger, has a heads-up display and some other improvements.
It was only about 10 am when we left the airport, too early to check into the hotel and we were ready for an adventure (yeah what is new right?) and headed off to Salton Sea. Gerald had seen a program about this shallow rift lake below sea level and right on the San Andreas Fault in the Imperial and Coachella valleys - and it went straight onto his bucket list because he has never been below sea level. Hmm forgetting Amsterdam where some parts of the city are 6 feet below sea level? Salton sea is actually about 35 miles long, 15 miles wide and 226 feet below sea level. At one time there was a thriving community living there and a marina. What we saw now was far from thriving and the marina was very high and dry. Now the city is nothing more than a collection of ramshackle trailers in the desert next a smelly but fascinating inland salt lake. The beach is a mix of crushed fish bones from the millions of fish that have died here and of course the salt. You can see fish skeletons in so many different stages of pulverisation but amazingly there are still tilapia living in this sea - they were introduced way back when and still tolerate the high salt and pollution levels.
On Monday I saw news that a second swarm of earthquakes had hit in the area, this was the second set of earthquakes there in two months and it looks as though we just missed this one !
On the way out to Salton Sea we had passed what appeared to be 'farms' of palm trees of various sizes and there were bags hanging from some of these so of course we had to go and investigate. We found that these were date palms and the bags were covering the 'fruits' - neither of us had ever seen dates growing and we managed to walk around among the trees and even taste a couple of dates fresh off the trees. It is amazing how much fruit hangs from a single bunch, how many bunches hang down from each frond and how many fronds each tree has. The bags were muslin and apparently they are to keep the insects and birds from the fruit as well as to catch any dates that ripen earlier than the others. on one street corner we saw a vendor selling boxes of medjool dates - $15 for five pounds !
After taking a walk around the date farm we drove a bit deeper into the farmland and fields of citrus trees, mostly lemons with some grapefruit. The ground around the trees was smothered in dropped fruit and a lot of the fruit on the trees had brown rot so we are guessing that this was a bumper crop that may have got hit by some wet weather.
Half a mile or so down the road we came across a field of something growing at low level that had a type of leaf that almost looked like some type of fern frond. Lucky me, I saw a farmer drive along the edge of his field in an ATV so I asked him what he was growing - of course he looked at me as though I was some sort of crazy person who must have fallen off another planet before he told me that they are artichoke. I explained that in Montana we grow sugar beets and grain so I had never seen artichoke growing before - still I felt like one of those city slickers that thought a cow was a buffalo or something.
After our adventures we started heading back the hundred plus miles to find our hotel. We had to join the huge exodus from all the desert 4 wheeling weekend fun back to the city - you can't imagine all of the hundreds of vehicles and campers on the road hauling their 4-wheelers back home. It made me think of all the snowmobilers heading back home after a Montana winter weekend - just multiply that by many hundred percent and you may get the picture.
In general, driving in California is so much worse than driving in the City of San Antonio, there are just so many more vehicles that I can almost understand why road rage is more prevalent here.
Look at the view from our hotel room, nice place to work from :)
