dsandler.org

Erin sent me a much better link for The Thing?, which I spliced back into my original entry on the topic.

Sorry for the dearth of updates yesterday. (I know, you’re terribly heartbroken.) Mobitex coverage through the desert is almost entirely absent (we were without GSM for pretty much of the way, too).

More nice desert photos today. The weather was mild, too, which allowed us to spare the AC a bit. Saw some cows—hundreds, in fact—in cramped paddocks outside El Paso. (These were definitely not “happy California cows”.)

A great deal of today’s eleven and a half hours (driving, sitting in traffic, waiting for “fast” food) served to remind that there are still millions of completely uninhabited acres in this country. (This is not by any means to say we should fire up the drills in Seward’s Folly. Compared to the ANWR, this region is definitely the ass-end of space.)

PS: To the other guy named Dan at the Einstein Bros. Bagels east of Phoenix, who clearly ordered some kind of egg-on-a-bagel thing, let me just say that I’m sorry, and that I didn’t know what I had done until we were back on I-10.

Road to nowhere

Seen today: a very hazy, smoggy Hollywood (highway 101’s last hurrah for us); a vast, hypnotic wind farm; the California desert landscape along I-10.

Day 1 is done, in Phoenix.

Since I’ll probably be rushed tomorrow morning, I think I’ll go ahead and flip over the map graphic in the sidebar.

Tomorrow will be the longest driving day, at about 740 miles. (The Phoenix→Odessa leg clocks in at 727 miles; Odessa→Houston, 507. We wanted the last day to be somewhat shorter, so we can arrive in the late afternoon and start recuperating.)