This road trip doesn’t rank high up with some of our others for scenic discoveries, but we accomplished our goals: deliver goats to Texas, visit with family, and return with our granddaughter. We were gone 9 days and that makes it one of our longest trips. Our granddaughter has been at our place most of the week since then and will be in California for another four days. So it seems as though I have been not dealing with anything business related for 2-1/2 weeks.

After our two does kidded last spring the plan was for the two doe kids to go to my daughter in Texas. Covid happened, no one travelled and those two kids grew into two big yearlings. There was another doe kid born this spring so the three of them were on the list to move to Texas. We loaded up on a Friday morning and didn’t have a plan other then “south on I-5, east on I-10”. We finally got underway about 9 a.m.

We always use the Road Atlas for each state to keep ourselves entertained and to learn details about what we see. This time I also bought a kids’ version for my granddaughter to use on the trip back to California.

Later in the trip I started to look forward to the Freeway Art that I saw, especially near some of the larger cities in the southwest. Some depict animals or natural scenes and others are reminiscent of weaving patterns. How about this point twill?

I take photos while we’re driving partly to entertain myself and partly because I am writing blog posts in my head. However, I’m not trying to create a documentary and my “drive-by” photos are usually not very good quality. So I have deleted most and saved only a few to use for sharing what I was thinking about on this LONG drive. This is a wagon full of carrots somewhere “down the valley” about 5-1/2 hours from home.

We thought that we’d avoid the LA rush hour traffic by heading from Bakersfield east to Needles and then dropping down to I-10. However my weather app showed that, although temps were high everywhere, the high would be close to 115 degrees at Needles. The truck is air conditioned, but not the trailer where the goats were riding. So we chose to avoid that extreme heat by taking Highways 14 and 138 that meandered south and east.

As I’ve said before when talking about our own farm, without irrigation water, much of California is a desert. So there is nothing out of the ordinary about dry hills in the summer, but I usually expect to hills colored gold from the dry grass. There were portions of the drive where the dry landscape was striking and, I thought, eerily apocalyptic. Along much of I-5 in the San Joaquin Valley (north of where this photo was taken) there are some areas where there is not even any grass cover and there are many dead orchards.