Another stellar dawn greeted us on Monday morning, as I put on my heavy coat, hat, scarf and gloves before venturing out with the dogs for their early morning walk. Immediately outside the sliding doors to the parking lot I realized something was different and it became rapidly apparent that I was badly overdressed for a frost free zone ????????????.
I would like to take a moment to highly recommend the Gaia Hotel as a dog friendly hotel. It is located just off I-5 in Anderson. The ground floor dog rooms have their own private sliding glass doors opening onto the outside of the hotel, there is a huge 5 plus acre field for airing dogs and an excellent hot breakfast is included. Thanks to Hope for the recommendation! Definitely ***!
Once breakfast was over we eased out into the traffic on the I-5 heading south towards Sacramento for the 8 hour drive to Ridgecrest. Most of the drive was unremarkable, through a long featureless valley filled with fruit and almond groves, rice farms, industrial centres, smaller centres and new subdivisions popping up everywhere. The occasional homeless encampment clung to the sides of the railway tracks that paralleled the interstate. The sight of a young Sikh man (backlit by the morning sun) standing by a small cooking fire in one of the encampments will stay with me for a while. One wonders what his story is…..
Thick haze obscured the Sierras to the east for most of the drive. The zig zag transit through Sacramento and the accompanying change over to 99 to take us to Bakersfield woke us up. Use your GPS at this point: lane and directional changes happen REALLY fast and at 70 MPH there is no room for error. The photos below are typical of our view for the balance of the drive. Lots of bad 80’s pop tunes helped pass the time.
Once we turned east at Bakersfield onto 58 the topography changed rapidly on our approach to the foothills of the Sierras. The skies had cleared, CJ was driving and I had the camera going non-stop. Most of these photos were taken with Cj’s android phone. I must admit (heresy for an iPhone user) that the camera is really good on the phone- there is anti vibrate feature on the camera that makes it ideal for shooting from a moving vehicle. Agricultural land morphed into foothills and then into mountains and snow at higher elevations as we dropped into Tehachapi. The thousands of spinning wind turbines emerging out of the snow created an amazing panorama as we transited the valley.
Traffic thinned out quite a bit as we left 58, continuing east on 14 towards Ridgecrest through what seemed like a couple of quarter sections of solar panels and a stunningly beautiful high desert valley – dotted here and there with Joshua trees.
Just as we were wondering if Ridgecrest actually existed, the junction to 395 appeared and we made a left turn towards the Sierras into another painting like view. Wow – just wow!!!!! The final photo was taken from the back yard of our hosts Brad and Danette. The dogs got a good run, are now bedded down in the house, a wonderful pot roast dinner was waiting for us plus some of Brads world famous german chocolate cake/cupcakes! We are looking forward to taking the dogs on a long run in the desert tomorrow and then photographing this amazing place in the afternoon. Stay tuned!
