On the Road to California, Part 2

Brazil, IN. Home of the Popcorn Festival. 
Three long, straight days of driving on I-70. We called Indiana's stretch of it Roadkill Alley because we counted twelve deer, five raccoon, and who knows how many smaller animal carcasses before we reached the Illinois State line.


From the "You Had One Job..." file...
On the plus side, the fall colors are beautiful, with golds and yellows becoming predominant the further west we go. The fields in Kansas are in the end stages of clearing their wheat crops, though millet crops still remain. Some fields, already harvested and plowed, are showing the budding green of winter ryegrass. A few heads of black cattle dot the landscape. We are listening to John Sandford novels which makes time pass swiftly.

We were staying with friends in Aurora, CO on Halloween night, and what a treat it was to see so many trick-or-treaters come to their door. We've been in New York for 26 (!!) years, and over that entire period of time I can count the number of children who have come to our door in costume on two hands. So it was such fun to see miniature superheros, princesses, Jedi, and all manners of ghouls approach with their sacks of goodies.







Day five is my favorite drive of the trip -- ten hours from Denver to St. George, Utah is the most spectacular scenery of the whole country, as the route encompasses the Rockies in Colorado and the mesas in Utah. This year it was a day of weather swings: while it started out at 36 degrees and wonderfully clear when we left Aurora, two hours later we had snow and temps had dropped to 26 degrees. Yet when we finally emerged in St. George, it was nearly 70 degrees at 6:30 PM.

Vail Pass is so beautiful with all the deep red rocks and trees coated in snow, and the lifts running at Breckenridge. Always a distant shock to see that the summit of the village of Vail is about 8200 feet, while all around us the Rockies loom an additional 2500 feet.

The snow showers eased into occasional raindrops as we meandered through the spectacular Glenwood Springs cut.
Glenwood Canyon
Gee...do you suppose this is a cell tower? hahaha
Chris and I comment on how the sky over western Colorado and Utah is such a stunning shade of blue...the result of not a speck of humidity or smog in the air!! On a side note, it's always a bit of an adjustment for us sea-level peeps for the thousand-plus miles we spend at 4000+ feet of elevation.
Impossible to capture the grandeur (and the colors!) of the mesas in Utah!

Utah lives up to its squeaky-clean image when it comes to their roadways: smooth and seemingly newly paved with nary a pothole in sight. Only tumbleweeds blow across the roads -- no trash. The city of St. George sits in a valley surrounded by deep red rocks that are especially gorgeous at sunrise. Here's the sunset there.

In contrast, my least favorite day of travel is our last one, through the deserts of Arizona, Nevada, and California...five hours of ugliness. Some folks find beauty in the desert; I'm not one of them. And sadly, coming over the Cajon Pass into San Bernardino County and seeing the smogbelt over the unrelenting suburban sprawl that is Southern California is depressing. 

But then we turn off the freeway onto the tollway over the foothills and into Laguna Canyon. And we see again the blue Pacific at Main Beach, the bougainvilla, eucalyptus and manzanilla trees, and everything in me relaxes.

Home.

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