More pictures

Thank you to Suz and her husband for identifying the coral looking cactus. They are pencil cholla.

A different set of windfarms on I-10 between Palm Springs and Loma Linda. These are just so neat. Some are small and others are huge!!










The ones below are actually pretty small, even though they tower over us.




This was the main reason I wanted to go to Southern California. If you notice, this is a double headstone. Or it should be........I didn't think about going back to the office to ask when the etching would take place. We had thought it would be done by now.




Just below the headstone above, is this little placard that does have grandma's name, date of birth and death and age on it. Still, I was very disappointed.




Sun and shadow play on the desert.

This is the highest point that you can drive to and easily walk to in JTNP. Looking south, it looks out into the valley and Palm Springs should be down there. To the west there is a pass that brings the smog from the LA area. YUCK!!


I didn't realize that JTNP was a rock climbing haven. When we were there two years ago, we only saw the other side of the park, this time we went in a different entrance and encountered the rocks and climbers. My dad was a climber over 18 years ago, before his health took him in a different direction.

I was having fun with the different settings on my camera. Because of the sun, I couldn't see how this turned out until later when it was on the computer. If I had thought about it, I would have continued playing with the B&W settings more.

I thought this was cool how the sun was hitting the rocks.

I finished my Titania's Revenge on the drive down. I think Thursday afternoon. I made a few modifications to the pattern, just in decreasing stitches which in a couple of spots messed the cable pattern up, but they still look nice. These are made out of the Titania colorway from BMFA and the pattern is by Cookie A. They are from the Rockin' Sock Club last year.

I finished my block on Saturday afternoon and promptly cast on for a pair of socks for Kim, but I STILL have not taken any pictures of them. I am through the heel on one of them and just starting the heel on the other.

This is one of our stops that is always made on our way home. It is right off the freeway in Redding. In California, you can buy alcohol of all kinds, in the grocery stores, here in Oregon, it is just beer and wine. You have to go to a specific liquor store if you want something else. Anyways, this place has everything in one store for very reasonable prices.

This is just a couple of the bottles that we bought. They had the Baileys mint and caramel which we can only find up here around Christmas time, if the stores haven't been sold out. We have never had Frangelico, it is hazelnut and it is yummy. All of these are really good in hot cocoa, or with a little cream and ice.

This is the cindercone by Mt. Shasta. One of the pictures that I didn't take on the way down was of Mt. Shasta. It was clear and you could see the mountain perfectly. It's usually clouded over. I think there have been only two times that we have ever seen the mountain without clouds around it, last August was one of them, this trip down was another. When we came back you could see nothing. We have also never seen snow on the cindercone!!

We had snow coming down from Dunsmuir to Weed, about a 20 mile distance. Then as we headed up the Siskiyous there was more snow. On the California side, it was sunshiney and snowing, once we hit the summit and the north side, it was foggy and cloudy like this. I tried to get a picture of our temperature gauge, but I couldn't get it to come out. The low coming down the Oregon side was 33 degrees F.



Summit of the Siskiyous.

The next day at home, this is what we encountered. Spring had sprung while we were gone.

The grape hyacinths smell like honey and have taken over the yard.

Playing with the sepia setting as we are flying up I-5.

Playing with the B&W setting as we are flying up I-5.

This week when I emailed my uncle, he said there had been snow in Yucca Valley on Wednesday!! I think we left in the nick of time!!

Desert Picture Heavy Post

Out past the town of Mojave and Edwards Air Force Base, is this mine on the side of the mountain. It is cool looking from a distance. you wonder what they mine out of it. This is on the south side of Hwy 58. On the north side is another mine, an open-pit mine. It is on the desert floor with the mine built over it. Here you can click on each site to see what they mined. In the bit of searching I have done online, the picture below could be a mercury mine or a gold mine. There were and are to this day several working mines in this area.

My uncle has a vacation home, just outside of Joshua Tree National Park. That was our destination. This was an old run down cabin from the 1930's I think. About 10 years ago, maybe more, maybe less, he started cleaning it out and making it into a nice desert vacation get away. It is very relaxing, mostly quiet except for the occasional noise of a motorcycle dirt bike, and the cooing of doves and sound of cactus wrens.

Prickly Pear Cactus

Prickly Pear candy is good. I know we got some on our trip to the Grand Canyon three years ago. It is very sweet.

Barren desert.

Stink Beetle that I found in the kids' bathroom on Saturday morning. I gently took him/her outside. Black in upper left corner of picture. It was the size of my thumb from the joint to the tip of the nail.

I saw at least a dozen jet trails within a twenty minute time frame as I sat outside on Saturday morning trying to draw in the sun and some warmth. The wind was blowing a little bit so I didn't get too warm.

Toward Joshua Tree National Park.

My partially finished block for the month of March. Robert says I should call it my desert block.

Barrel cactus.

Young Joshua Tree.

Up close spikes on the young Joshua Tree.

Juniper Bush with large Juniper Berries.

Beautiful rocks in front of the house. They are lining most of the front deck.

Jack Rabbit by the front wheel of the van.

Looking Southwest towards the Little San Berdardino Mountains and San Bernardino Mountains. (I think)

Definitely the San Berndardino Mountains, with snow on one of the peaks.

Another Joshua Tree. I promise there will be lots more later.

I haven't figured out what cactus this one is. There is also a close up of it right below. To me it looks like coral with spines.

Cholla, or Jumping Cholla, or Teddy Bear Cholla. We had these in Arizona when I was a kid. They were not fun if you got prickled by them!! The white one in the middle of the picture.

Trees

Thank you!! I think this is it. The Western Redbud. Wikipdia has more pictures.

It isn't the Butterfly Bush, but that was a good idea. I had heard last year that those are invasive species in Oregon, and when I looked on this site, there are states that they won't ship to, so it must be non-native or invasive in other states as well. Thank you MotherGoose and Becky.

Once in a while I will get emails about the Arbor Day Foundation and their specials when you become a member. They offer Redbud trees, and I have often thought they were pretty and would like one. Hmm, we have two empty tree spaces now..........

Really, I am here......

I meant to blog after dd's birthday and my time got away from me. Kim got her ears pierced a week after her birthday. We did end up at Claire's Accessories and they were great about the piercings. It was quick and almost pain free. Kim said it hurt for just a bit, then went away. They were clean and courteous about the whole experience. They gave us explicit instructions to follow and Kim has been religious about following them. She has found that some places we went into over the past couple of weeks have really freaked her out. Places that she has felt like weren't clean enough for her to enter their doors and she would get infected ears just by being there. It is good for a quiet chuckle to ourselves, but I think I understand where she is coming from.



We went on a quick trip to the high desert of southern California and I have a ton of pictures to share. Between Kim and myself, we took over 200 pictures, and I went through and labeled all of them today. There were some pictures that I didn't get that I later wished I had taken. Oh well. I'll tell you what they were later.




We see these trees in the Spring when we drive to California, they are absolutely beautiful and I asked Robert to stop. I would love to know what they are. The bees love them, they were all over them when we stopped, but they don't seem to smell a lot. They look a little bit like lilac flowers when you get close to them, but not quite. They are just this beautiful shade of purpley-pink. We have seem them before on our drive down, usually just in the mountains above Lake Shasta. This time we actually saw them around Sacramento as well. In some spots they kind of looked invasive.














We left last Wednesday and drove to Corning, CA, getting there around 6:00 pm. We like to stop in Corning because they have olives there. I didn't get any pictures of the olive trees, but this is the place we really like to stop at and stock up on olives. Her prices are more reasonable than the touristy place up the road. They process their olives without using lye. Most of the olives in the industry go through a lye bath. These are processed in a brine instead. We really like the flavor a lot better, and they Tehama style keeps things like almonds and garlic crisp once they have been canned. We actually stopped there twice, once on the way down to get two jars, one for us to eat and one to leave at our destination, then on our way back to really stock up. There are signs as you come to Corning about it being the Olive City.

When we left Corning the next morning, we ended up behind this!!! It literally went 35 mph for about 10 miles before taking an overpass to let traffic by. I can only imagine how far back the traffic was, in the rear-view windows it looked like it went for miles. As we passed it, there were signs on it about live animals. It wobbled back and forth as they went down the road.

Driving across California is a unique experience. We crossed mountains, farmland with stinky feedlots, fields of crops and orchards, and more mountains like these. I love these wind farms. I think they are so cool to look at and marvel at how much energy they produce. I don't know how much it is, but it just seems like it would be a lot.

To end this post, these were taken by Kim about 3 hours before we reached our destination. She said the colors really looked like this, especially the egg-yolk yellow. I wasn't looking.

More later, I have laundry to do, and we really need groceries, especially 1/2&1/2 for our coffee. :)