Road Trip, Part 2

I'm driving through the desert in a car with no name

The more southerly route worked -- in fact, once I got past LA, the weather was gorgeous. The drive was relatively uneventful -- after picking up a battery pack from Megavision in Goleta, I managed to hit the road well before 9am. The GPS routed me through LA, and I was surprised to see a few familiar sights along the way. (I have photos, but I'm too tired to upload them tonight -- expect them in a day or two). I stopped off in 29 Palms, CA for lunch and to get petrol, then I headed south through the Joshua Tree National Park. Wow, such a very strange looking place, like a slightly less red Mars with sparse vegetation. I'm sure I spotted a few Star Trek locations as I was driving. I didn't have much time, so I didn't really explore the park very deeply, but I did stop to take photos. The replacement battery pack worked a treat, so I was able to shoot some strangely shaped rocks and a Joshua tree before I had to get moving toward Phoenix. I'll post photos here once I've had a chance to copy them off the OQO, but like I said, I'm way too tired to do that tonight. I just drove, today, further than I've ever driven in my life, possibly further than is actually possible to drive in a straight line inside the UK. And I get to do it again tomorrow. And on Friday, Sunday and Monday. My trip is about equivalent to driving from London to Kiev and back, though of course the roads here are typically dead straight and have far less traffic than their European equivalents, so it's perfectly possible to drive at the speed limit for 5 hours continuously without even touching the brakes.

The weather forecast hasn't improved much, so I am going to have to play it safe and take a quite circuitous route to Albuquerque, avoiding the high altitude routes. My plan is to drive south east to Tucson, AZ, pick up the I-10, then head east until I get to the I-25, then go north to Albuquerque. It's hard to be exact, but I'm guessing about 8 hours of driving, about the same as today. My original plan would have only needed about 5 hours tomorrow, so this is a bit nontrivial. I don't know yet if there will be much time for photography, but I'll have to see how it works out. Oh well, hopefully things will improve from here.