Land Before Time

Oct. 2, 2013

This morning was another lazy start. We decided not to go to Sea World or the zoo (again because we are cheap like the Dutch) and instead decided to take a little drive through the Gaslight District of San Diego before heading out of the city. At breakfast I saw the old lady from yesterday, but today she didn’t ask me to make her waffle.

Overall we have noticed that the traffic in San Diego not bad at all, I think that there is more traffic in Langley at 9:30am than there was driving through San Diego this morning; definitely less traffic than LA. Also today was the first day was actually got my laptop working for GPS instead of Ben’s phone, which for whatever reason won’t charge while it is plugged in and navigating, so we  had a couple frustrating situations the last couple days when his battery was dead.

Anyways, we headed out of the city and up to a little mining town in the mountains called Julian. We were fortunate enough to end up behind a Sheriff truck that was going super slow. Eventually he pulled off at a ranger station and we were able to have some fun on the winding road.

 Julian itself was super cute and there were lots of shops to wander through. Julian is famous for its apples so of course we stopped to share a pie of the most delicious apple crumble pie with cinnamon ice cream. Unfortunately we didn’t really have time to do the mine tour as it took 90 minutes and we still had quite a bit of ground to cover today. 

Much to Ben’s delight, the road out of Julian through the mountains and into the desert was even more twisty than the road in. Once it flattened out into desert we could see that there must have been some flash flooding recently as there were some trucks clearing sand off the road.

Our next stop was the Salton Sea. We pulled off into Salton City with the intention of finding a beach, but driving down the road was like riding a bucking bronco (I assume, I have never tried), and the whole area was really barren and awful, with poorly kept homes strewn sporadically throughout the landscape. So we got back onto the highway and went down a little further to Salton Beach, where we planned to have a picnic lunch.

 This area was also pretty depressing but we did make it to the waterfront, which turned out to be less than appealing. It smelled really salty, and what from a distance looked like sand was actually dead barnacles and dry fish corpses. It was pretty nasty. Apparently the lake is stocked, but because it is so salty the fish can’t actually survive for very long, so there are a lot of dead fish everywhere. It was also pretty hot, about 32 degrees, so we didn’t stick around and instead went back to the car to turn on the air conditioning and had our picnic in the car on our way out of the most unappealing lake country ever.

From the Salton Sea, we continued north through the desert and I fell asleep in the car again. We stopped briefly for gas and to take some pictures of dinosaurs for Teresa’s benefit. Our final destination for today was Ridgecrest (formerly known as Crumville), which is near China Lake airborne weapons testing and training area.

We mostly stopped here because it was the largest town for a while and we didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with no place to stay (for those wondering, no we have not once used the tent we brought…). Ben ended up booking us into a Motel 6, because it was the cheapest option, and really how bad could it be? The room itself was fine, clean, basic amenities. However apparently the Motel 6 attracts all sorts of riff-raff; neither of us got a very good sleep because the walls were paper thin and there were people coming and going all night. We were on the ground floor and our car was parked right outside our room. At one point around 2:45am I actually got out of bed to check on our car because I could hear people banging around outside. Ben was also awake and super irritated with our air-conditioner that was making a buzzing/squeeking sound; to me it was much needed white noise but apparently it was keeping him awake.