Mary Panttaja

Mike’s Roadhouse in Mojave on Route 66 is more of a diner actually. We finally did lunch around 5PM. The food was “fine” (though the beef stroganoff was not near as good as MaryEvelyn’s.)

The drive through Mojave and down through the Tehachapi was disorienting to say the least. Out of the desert has sprung miles and miles—thousands—of windmills of all sizes spinning in all directions. The kinetic display, as you try to navigate the highway, is disorienting. The Mojave desert generates far more power than it could consume: we passed one coal burning plant, two enormous solar panel arrays, and the tremendous set of wind generators. It’s like the desert is just this energy generation plant, only it’s hardly livable on it’s own. I guess that’s why you can use so much of the land for such installations.

We biked out again in the dusk into a blistering red sunset. This time it was smoke instead of cumulous. A neighboring camper said there has been a fire in Santa Barbara for two weeks. We hadn’t heard as we’ve gotten little or no news while we were traveling. (Our own fault, we didn’t listen to any radio or watch any tv or read many papers.) The train here is even louder that ever, though they don’t need the whistles here east of Bakersfield.

Home tomorrow.

PS. Overnight I discovered that I was wrong about the train whistles.