Two Days, Twenty-Four Hours

The Great Basin, Nevada, south of Ely.

Geography and flora shock us as we sit at home in Tucson two days after we left Lower Alaska, after about twenty-four hours of driving time. We've seen so much change in a short time.

The Salish Sea is so lush with vegetation and water. Drive over Snoqualmie Pass and past Ellensburg, the rolling hills of the almost treeless Inland Empire spreads out. Then the Yakima River and its vineyards and orchards, then bare hills, then the Columbia River, "Welcome to Oregon" near Umatilla, and more bare hills until Pendleton and the Blue Mountains. On and on.

Most of the places we passed and their sequence are fresh in my mind, like a road map inside the head of a wagon train guide.

I was hoping to take a photo of this sign
marking the east end of the
Extraterrestrial Highway . . .

It rained as we left Seattle, it again rained in the Great Basin, our second morning after overnight in Ely, and it rained very heavily just as we pulled into out little dead-end street of San Simeon.

. . . but this was how it looked to us,
blurry. The other snap is off the web.

Indeed, on our drive north two weeks earlier, it had drizzled in Nevada's Great Basin, then just as we drove onto Whidbey Island from the ferry, it started to rain heavily.

Rain is a blessing.

It's impossible to describe what it's like being by the Salish Sea. It's gorgeous. It's impossible to describe countless places of dramatic and subtle beauty along our route — and that's only from the road as we whizzed by. (One of these days I will retire and actually pull off the road occasionally.) It's equally impossible to describe the harsh, stunning, and inspiring beauty of the Sonoran Desert.

I can write that it's good to be home and that I'm glad we have made our home on our little acre of the Sonoran Desert.