"Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert."

Soundtrack:

Jose Feliciano cover of California Dreamin'

The California border has a checkpoint where they check what animals and plants (or flora and fauna if you're cool) you may be bringing in.  California is an odd bird for many reasons, and this is just one of them. Lucky for us, we picked one of the lanes where no one was there to check us. If there was, they would have looked into our car and seen a white rabbit with red eyes doing one of his classic 'I didn't do it!' stares he is so well known for.  Then where would we be?

Probably still fine, but it's a funny image I like to think about.

Immediately, blindingly so, after the Arizona desert is green! California grows a lot of produce, and there were growing fields as well as palm trees right away. I don't know why palm trees suddenly begin in California, probably some artificial reason I don't want to think about (a la the movie Chinatown), but they're everywhere.

As you drive through the fields of whatever crops they grow, blissful things like strawberries, there are suddenly no longer the same green bugs squishing into your windshield at high speeds.  Like many things on the trip, this bug smashing is something I became so used to that I noticed immediately when it stopped.  I felt I was in a magical place.  Then I knew I was in a magical place, because there were these little yellow butterflies everywhere around me.  In the fields, around the road... and then squishing into my windshield.  Not green bugs, but little yellow butterflies now.

I wondered to myself, is this a good sign? Is this a bad sign? I am squishing beautiful butterflies now - are they some welcoming gift to me or am I angering the blissful yellow god of sunshine by running into his yellow minions? After enough dead butterflies are on your windshield you begin wondering why they can't figure out the trend going on and avoid the road.

We stopped at a gas station. There was a lot of young people sitting around doing drugs, which really bothered me, because I'm getting old I guess.  Then there was this old homeless guy with a friendly white beard collecting cans in a grocery cart. I think it was the beard that did it but I approached him and gave him a little money. I never know the rules on that sort of thing, but I needed to do something nice for someone because I was so tired from travelling, if that makes any sense at all. When I shook his hand, he smiled at me and looked me in the eye and said, "You are welcome!"

And I was! I felt good after that. He was a nice guy, I think. I hope he did something good with it.

Then Amber and I went through a vast hilly backroad that was leading to the deserts of California. There was a yellow traffic sign before that said "dips ahead". We speculated how bad the dips, whatever those were, had to be for there to be a sign.  Very bad, apparently. Dips are just up and down hills, as we learned.

This is also a foreshadowing to the kind of winding bumpy roads that some Californians are used to. On the mountains, for example, people drive roads I would have once considered very unsafe. They think they are perfectly acceptable, and my mountain landlords refer to any paved road as highways. I think they are savages, and I refer to them as Wildlings when I speak of these people to Amber. Although I suspect that one day their ways may become my ways.

By this time Brutus had become good at maneuvering different roads in his seat so he didn't get sick. What I mean is that on the first day, he would have just looked scared at less than smooth roadways. Now, when things got choppy, he turned himself around so he was facing the seat for better traction, and he would bob and weave with the motion of the car. He developed this technique on his own.  I imagine him thinking, "I am a leaf on the wind. I am a leaf on the wind," to himself as we drove through the up and down wasteland.

Then we straightened out on the road, and as we began to have a moment to look around I felt very peaceful.  This was the California desert. I pulled over with Amber and the hot burning wind and white sand just felt so purifying to me. I took a few pictures, and we moved on. Even stranger still, the "desert" as we thought we had been in became moreso. It was all sand dunes and this one road we were on.

Amber and I both stopped again.  I looked at her and said, "Where are we?" She shrugged. We both were thinking it was like Saudi Arabia only in California. I'm looking at a map now, and it had to be the Glamis Dunes on Rte 78. I need to go back there, just to prove that it was real. It's amazing.

It was nighttime when we finally started going up the mountain to our place. Brutus starting really doing his maneuvers, because the roads kept moving back and forth, winding up. Then we went through the rocky pathways and our new landlords showed us where we would sleep.  We slept for about a day, and Brutus laid down in the same spot for at least two day.

I am not cut out to be a nomad, but it was a wonderful journey.  We will see if Amber and I are cut out to live like these Wildlings up here.