Our Poppy Day
Southern California in bloom!
Southern California in bloom!
I went on to the mesas which have been beckoning me ever since I came. Up a canyon, talking with a farmer who was raising melons on a cultivated strip on its bottom. He had a cow bitten by a rattlesnake that morning…
Our daughter brings back the van and calls us to “See who’s here!” The man coming from the front passenger seat can’t be here in California–he lives in Washington–what is a clone of our son-in-law doing HERE?
This year we drove into Lone Pine in an afternoon shower with a curtain of dark cloud pouring over Mt. Whitney and surrounding peaks.
A spell of spring weather, in between wintry winds and El Nino rain, brought us out to swing on on the patio, watching the sunset fade, the stars come out, and planes from LAX blinking their way perhaps to Houston.
We happened on a reference to Mark Twain’s management of a donkey in my grandfather’s journal which sent us to the library for Twain’s travel book “Roughing It.” We find our daily dose of laughter in his descriptions.
One of the obviously old or “original Route 66” derelict buildings appeared at first to have been a gas station, but the way it’s laid out we don’t see where gas pumps could have been installed.
What remains of Route 6 is 3205 miles between Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Bishop, California. It intersects twice with the more famous Route 66.
From Portagee Joe Camp in Lone Pine we can see Mt. Whitney, the highest peak of the Sierras. We drive north on Rt. 395 along Sierra wall which separates the west coast of California from the eastern arid area for nearly 400 miles
The creek gurgles and spashes like background dinner music or a lullaby, most of the sites are in shade, and we’ve never found the place crowded.