Day 14: The Road to Anaheim, CA

The hottest news topic in Los Angeles yesterday, September 27^th, was the heat. It was 113 degrees (F) in downtown LA, the hottest temperature on record for any day, ever. And that was the day we arrived in Anaheim (more or less a suburb of LA where Disneyland is located) after crossing the Mohave Desert coming from Laughlin, NV. We stopped briefly in San Bernardino where the wind had picked up but even the wind was hot. I’ve felt warm breezes in the past but this is the first time I’ve experienced hot gusts of wind.

The drive from Laughlin was seemingly endless desert. Mounds of sandy gravel rolled along beside the highway, and in many areas there wasn’t a speck of vegetation, just rock and sand. Where there was some greenery, these scrub plants, seemed to be gasping for whatever moisture they could suck out of the arid ground and the scorching air left over from the last rain which, by the look of the landscape, was a long, long, time ago. It’s a mystery to me that there is any flora out here at all. As for fauna, other than a few hawks circling overhead, I can only imagine what types of spiders, and snakes and scorpions, oh my, were waiting out the heat of the day to emerge into the cool desert night. I’d rather not think about it.

We decided it was prudent not to stop in the desert. We had plenty of gas to get us all the way to Anaheim but it eventually became necessary to find a Rest Stop (if you know what I mean). The first one we saw was closed and the next one was thirty some miles away. Now I’m getting worried.  We finally got to the next Rest Stop and it was, you guessed it, CLOSED. The penny finally dropped: this is California. And, California is suffering such a financial crisis that it’s almost bankrupt. I guess it makes sense that there’s no money to maintain the Rest Stops.  But, have I mentioned that we were in the midst of miles and miles of desert?

Just when you think you might have to nip behind a cactus on the side of the highway (don’t think about the rattle snakes, don’t think about the rattle snakes), or that you may never see civilization of any kind again, up pops a Dairy Queen – right in the middle of the Desert – attached to a 76 Gas Station. The restroom was very busy. I guess I wasn’t the only one on the road in need of a Rest Stop. But that hot fudge sundae with whole peanuts never tasted that good on the west coast of Canada.

Does anyone know what all that black chunky rock is around Ludlow, CA? Where the ground had been flat and grey, it looked like a huge tiller had overturned the earth and up heaved coal black rock. It resembled the lava fields we saw in Hawaii but only covered a few square miles.

We arrived at our motel in Anaheim around 7:30 after getting directions from a very friendly and chatty young lady in a shop in San Bernardino and after negotiating our first taste of LA freeways.

Until tomorrow. . . .