Road Trip, Victorville, Ca

Here is a mince pie for Thanksgiving day...and again, so huge!

We drove up to Victorville, Ca on Sunday to re key a foreclosed house...its a nice drive up through the El Cajon pass.......and the traffic was fairly good..no back ups except for one spot where they were working on the side of the road.......on the way up, I spied a train coming round the bend...see if you can see it in the photo...you will have to click on it....

The house was in a new tract and I liked it...it had 3 bedrooms plus a room that could be used as a office, large living room with a fireplace, and a good sized kitchen with plenty of cupboards.....it was in very good condition also...I don't think the realtor will have a problem selling it....good neighborhood too with nice lawns and trees.......you really wouldn't know you were in the high desert......while Alan was working on a lock, I decided to stroll around the yard and found some cactus plants that were interesting.....

The spent flower heads look like birds heads, don't they? At least that's what it looked like to me from a distance.......

On the way back, we found this old chimney on the side of the freeway, standing all by itself...being shaded by a Joshua tree... Joshua trees dotted the landscape everywhere you look....sadly the high desert has been invaded by non-native weeds of all types....when we lived in Barstow in the 1960s, the desert floor was cleaner and didn't have all the weeds that you see now....it was mainly sand, rocks, cacti, Joshua trees and some mesquite.....the desert floor is scarred also by off road vehicle tracks..and takes centuries to recover. Thankfully, the county has now sectioned off certain areas for the off road crowd in order to save the desert....but damage has been done that the desert may never fully recover from.....in fact, when we lived there, we found covered wagon tracks off in the Calico mountain range from the silver miners that looked like they could have been made yesterday....the desert heals slowly...very slowly.