January 4, 2012

January 4, 2012

Guess what we did?  We changed our minds. Before we went to sleep last night we decided to stay here another day.  It is such a beautiful place.   After breakfast, we got in the truck and just drove.  It is great to be able to unhitch our trailer from the truck and take off for places unknown.  In this area, everywhere you look there is vegetation.  Last night I talked about seeing lots of date palm trees.  I just didn’t know there are over 100 kinds of dates.  (See, I learned something today!)  Crops we saw today include ruby stem Swiss chard, spinach, watermelons, corn, lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, grapes, sod fields, unidentifiable deep green thingys that looked luscious, and taller unidentifiable deep green thingys, too.   We even saw red, hot chili peppers being picked and short, olive green somethings being hoed.   Workers were out picking citrus.  Many oranges are ready…depending on their type.  Lemons are being picked and tangerines.  We had tangerines right off the trees here.  They were some kind of good!    As we drove around, we saw a development that was all set up with lot partitions, palm trees, bougainvillea blooming, as well as lantana, and something called Tacoma, which defies description.  Many of these blooming plants are covered in honey bees and humming birds.  We had a family of humming birds who lived in a pine tree on our property in Goldsboro, and they have a characteristic chirp that I recognize immediately.  They are fascinating and many of the ones here will just perch on the trees to survey their next flight path.  That just blows my mind.  I’m used to them flitting around, not sitting on a branch looking around!   

Right after we saw the development (it only has model houses and no sold signs) we saw a sign that pointed to a different road on which we found the Brown Date Ranch.  They let us taste test the different types of dates they had.  What wonderful snacks we had this morning!   The first dates came here from the Spanish missionaries in the 1800’s.  Offshoots (baby palm trees) were imported from some overseas desert areas in the early 1900’s because it had been discovered that the soil, rain, and climate of this area are superb for growing dates.  This area grows the majority of dates sold in this country.  They had date candy, corn meal cookies, and books on the sex lives of dates.  We were way too embarrassed to purchase those books! 

We drove through some of the date groves and saw the hanging dates enclosed in bags to keep the birds from eating them and to cut down on the hand picking necessary to harvest them.  The tallest date palms are around 25 feet high and have ladders for each tree so that the pickers can reach them.  These ladders are often carried back and forth daily.  Harvesting dates is heavy, labor intensive work.

After lunch, we drove to Salton Lake.  It is a huge saline lake that is rapidly dying because much of the water is being diverted to nearby cities and towns.  Small rivers run into the lake, but with no natural outlet so the salt content has increased even more because of the diverted waters.  The beach around the lake is composed of dead barnacles and the dark patches that are everywhere, are dead fish.  Birds abound in the area, but they do not eat the dead fish.  There is no smell of rotting fish, but the sharp, strong odor of salt water.  I certainly did not find the aroma offensive, but some of the people we’ve talked with have shuddered at mentioning the fragrance that surrounds the area.  What is their problem?

Tomorrow’s destination is not chiseled in stone, but I know we’ll be heading out early.  Hope the sun is high enough in the sky not to blind us as we head east!  Looking at the atlas, I-8 is as far south as we can go (in this area) without going into Mexico.  We didn’t bring passports, so we’ll need to stay north of the border!

Blessings from us to you,

Three traveling troopers