Wednesday March 27 2013

We hooked up and left Yuma around 9:30AM. We drove most of the day into Southern California. The landscape was pretty much the same as Arizona for the first part of the day. As we traveled further we began seeing areas of wind turbines. Each area had hundreds of wind turbines up on the hillsides on both sides of the roadway. In most of these areas I would guess there were as many as a couple thousands turbines of all sizes. There were the typical ones that looked much like the ones we see in Illinois but in some areas there were 3 to 4 different height and sizes ranging to very small ones close to the ground. As we traveled we also started noticing fields of solar panels and again, these numbered in the thousands just setting on the ground in open fields. I assume California depends highly on solar energy. We had a beautiful day for travel today and the farther north in California we traveled, the air began to cool. I began thinking I wanted to return to Arizona as it got quite cool at times when we stopped. When we got closer to L.A., we saw field after field of grape vineyards. The grape vines are planted in such neat, well kept rows and go for miles and miles. Later we started seeing fruit trees interspersed with the grapes. Some of the orchards looked like possibly olive trees. I looked the olive trees up on the internet as we traveled and the leaves appeared to be the same as those we were seeing. I also looked up almond trees and decided the orchards we were seeing could be almonds as well. I read on the internet that both olives and almonds are grown in central California. In some areas the trees were covered with white netting and the netting was very long and covered row after row of trees. The trees with the netting appeared to be either the olive or almond trees and I'm assuming the netting prevents the birds from eating the olives or whatever. I don't think the netting would be for preventing frost. As we were driving the motor home made a loud sound that we thought sounded like a vacuum leak. Larry keep looking at the gages on the dash but nothing was showing up. Soon after we heard this an alarm started going off about every 2 or 3 minutes. We decided we needed to find a Freightliner Service Center so I looked for one on the internet and found one in a town named Hesperia, which was just north of San Bernandino. We called and they told us they closed at 5:00 and if we could get there in time they would take a look at the motor home. We ended up getting to Hesperia about 4:40 but when we found Freightliner, they told us to come back tomorrow morning at 8:00 as they had no one to look at it today. We found a very nice RV Park called Desert Willow RV Resort. It was just a few blocks from where we have to take the motor home tomorrow. The site they gave us was very nice and the whole resort was spotless with lots of green grass, something we haven't seen much of since leaving home. We pulled in and set up the motor home and decided to walk over to a restaurant named Beef O'Brady's. We ordered a tall beer and an appetizer of homemade chips with bacon and cheese melted over them. We also ordered wings and they brought the chips first which were wonderful! By the time we got the wings, we were so stuffed we ended up with a doggy bag. We walked back to motor home and it was freezing! The wind was blowing and temperature was very cold. I could hardly wait to get in my pajamas and under the covers to warm up!