DogParksUSA is in Ventura CA today. We left Fort Lauderdale on May 23rd at 4PM EST, and drove and drove and droven along I-10, boondocking in the car for 3 nights, and covered 2,400 miles, arriving in southern California almost two days earlier than their first reservation in San Luis Obispo! Be assured that DogParksUSA stuck to 65mph or less the whole way (optimal gas mileage and n o trooper worries).
DogParksUSA really hates I-10 now, though! It is like a spaghetti bowl in New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio (you never know if it is going to divert left, divert right, unexpectedly without hardly any notice). Youch! And the desert is so ugly in Texas, from San Antonio to New Mexico -- El Paso looked absolutely dismal from I-10 (DogParksUSA has a 2 day dog park visit planned there; and hopes it looks better off of I-10) -- like a decrepit Mexican shanty town. There were a few high points, though. We spotted a few wind turbines in Texas near Big Bend Park and then saw the blades for two more wind turbines being transported on the other side of the highway back towards those small wind farms; the blades look really outer spacey and very long and unusually transported one-by-one on six tractor trailers. Then there was a fantastic section south of Tucson AZ along I-10 in Texas Canyon -- boy, the rock formations there were incredible -- it didn't look like Mother Nature placed those rocks that way, but of course, we have no proof nothing else did, and it is just really cool looking! Another high point was in the San Bernardino Valley in California -- we have never seen such a huge amount of turbines there -- wind farms covered the hills there and the wind gusts were tremendous on the highway, so obviously the location was ideal -- the turbines were large, small, and there were at least 300 or more of them. We couldn't view them as well as I wanted to while driving down those 5-lane winding highways there but everywhere we looked for miles and miles, were arrays of wind turbines. Starting in New Mexico and through Arizona, the freight train tracks ran closely parallel to I-40 and the amount of freight train traffic was incredible, and trains were long pulling lots of cars with two to four engines, and many of them were double-stacked with containers, every one of their 100 cars or so were double stacked. We liked watching them as they ran alongside the highway with us. We would hate to be stuck at an intersection waiting for those long trains to go by, though! Wow! We also found it interesting that, starting around San Antonio and through Arizona, every fourth pickup truck that passed ours on either side of I-40 was transporting a single refrigerator. Not loaded with furniture; just transporting one fridge. Who knew single fridge transport was so big in those parts?
We did visit one dog park today in Ventura CA (which is actually called San Buenaventura, but is commonly known everywhere, including in their own tourist material,s as "Ventura") which wasn't on the list of planned dog park assessments. The official dog park assessments start tomorrow when DogParksUSA arrives in the Wine Coast Country is California, the San Luis Obispo and Cayucos area. Stay tuned!
