veral miles long. It’s just big mountains of sand as far as you can see. There is a scene in the 3rd Star Wars movie where Jabba the Hut takes Luke and Leia into the desert to feed Luke to the sand worms, or something like that. This scene was filmed in these sand dunes just outside Yuma. That's Jabba's ship in the photo. The Star Wars team wanted to donate the $2-million dollar prop to the city of Yuma, but the city didn't want it. So, they chopped it up and burned it.Anyway, when we got to the sand dunes, Stephen and I couldn’t resist stopping to play a little. In fact, I told him, when we left Phoenix, that we'd stop to play in a really, really BIG sand box. He was excited.
It was HOT, but it was a dry heat so it wasn’t so bad. We started climbing up one of the dunes and found it very hard going. 3 steps forward, one step back. We played around, running down massive hills of sand, making sand avalanches by stomping on the ground, and generally just being silly. At one point, I ran down into a valley and didn't know if I'd be able to walk back up one of the walls to get back it. With Stephen's help ("Come on, Dad. Get up here!"), I was able to make it back out, short of breath and sweating like a... well... alot.
Becky and her mom waited for us back at the car. At one point, the border patrol honked and blew their siren but I don’t think they meant us. Whether they did or not, we just kept going and they didn’t come arrest us, so I guess all is well. Here are a couple of pictures of Stephen and I on one of the large dunes.
After the dunes, there is a fairly large stretch of road flanked on both sides by farmland – lush green farmland. That’s right – farmland in the desert. Farmers grow a lot of crops there because they can get in 3 full growing seasons each year. They actually like the fact that it seldom rains, because they can better control the irrigation of their fields for efficiency and crop growth. They grow such things as soybeans, barley, cauliflower, lettuce, cabbage, rapeseed (from which we get canola oil), and even some melons. I’ve been told that the Imperial Valley, as this area is known, actually produces 80-90% of the lettuce consumed in this country.
After the farmlands, we come to my favorite part of the trip - the Laguna Mountains at the eastern edge of San Diego County. Heading into these mountains, you start out actually below sea level. In a few miles, however, you will be almost 5000 feet above sea level driving among boulders as big as houses. The mountains are covered in rocks of all sizes – millions of them. One of my favorite things in this stretch of roads is a highway sign that says, “Watch for Rocks”. Not “Watch for Falling Rocks” but just “Watch for Rocks”. Stephen and I had fun pointing out the windows saying, “There’s one. There’s another, and another over there.” Ok, maybe a bad joke but when you're driving through these mountains, you’d have a hard time missing the rocks. Check out the pictures I’ve included.
When you first start to enter the mountains, from the desert on the east side, it could be 100 degrees outside. When you get out of the mountains, on the San Diego
side, however, you’re back into the lower 70s. It’s a very dramatic climate change right there and you can clearly see it on a Google Map satellite image.Well, we made it to San Diego later than we had planned so we did not make it to the new apartment in Escondido. We stopped at my company-provided temporary housing and rested. In the morning, on July 28, a big 18-wheeler carrying our household goods would arrive promptly at 8AM to start unloading... but that's another story coming soon.
Allen
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