The Voyage, part 2

Where did the month go since I last posted here? It has been many years since I’ve made a major cross-country move. I expected it to be time consuming for a while, but didn’t anticipate how all-consuming it would be, nor for how long.

The rest of the drive from Texas to Oregon went smoothly (with the exception of about 24 hours of food poisoning after eating at a Denny’s restaurant, on a late night when nothing else was around). What was most striking about the drive was that for almost three full days, we were crossing desert. I had not appreciated, until then, how much of the United States is composed of such harsh, inhospitable terrain. And the varying types of desert were also fascinating. For example, all of day two of the drive was consumed by crossing the vast expanse of west Texas—a flat, arid, monotonous land, with few signs of human habitation. The legal speed limit on Interstate Highway 10, crossing these lands, is 85 miles per hour, the highest on any highway in the nation.

The west Texas landscape

We left El Paso on the morning of day three of the drive, and later that morning crossed into New Mexico. By the afternoon we’d crossed another border and entered Arizona—still crossing arid desert landscapes, although strikingly different from the west Texas desert.

The rocky southern Arizona landscape

After an overnight stop in Phoenix, we pushed on across the western half of Arizona, including some of the most bleak, arid landscape we’d seen on the trip.

The sandy western Arizona desert landscape.

Too much heat and too little water create lands incapable of supporting much life. Will more of the earth become similarly uninhabitable?

We entered California in the afternoon of day four. Much of southern California was still very arid, although not quite as harsh as west Texas or Arizona. Circling around Los Angeles showed different kinds of blight, though: horrible traffic, backed up for mile after mile (fortunately going in the opposite direction on the freeway than we were traveling), and heavy, poisonous-looking smog blanketing the city.

Los Angeles smog.

California may not be extremely wide, but from north to south it is a very long state. We drove north through it all of day five–slowed somewhat by the food poisoning I’d contracted the night before. We stopped for the night in Sacramento, then on the morning of day six pushed north again, and finally crossed into Oregon.

This one speaks for itself.

Southern Oregon was VERY different from the deserts we’d spent so many days crossing: very mountainous, and very cold.

The mountains of southeastern Oregon.

But we reached Eugene later that day. It’s very beautiful here–and the trees grow very big!

We're not in Texas any more!

Life was supposed to enter a period of calm, with lots of spare time, after we arrived here. It hasn’t–but that’s a story for another post.