Rolling Northwest

 

Well once again its come to the part of the road trip where all the little roads are covered over with the dust of the desert and time, and the ramp of Interstate   10 leaves me no other option

Now if you want to traverse the nation rapidly from west to east or the other way around then the interstate highway system is for you.

But present-day interstates are a racetrack for the truck after truck, after truck …That I am pretty sure no longer have speed odometers that read actual speed. I think they have a device probably a digital speedometer that reads, “Slow” “Safe” “Fast” “Normal Fast”” Shouldn’t go this fast” “Floor it fast” “Balls to the walls fast” (Balls to the wall is a old school trucking term that originated when trucks had a 5-speed transmission and a 4 speed over drive and when both shift levers were in high gear, they were pushed all the way forward to the wall, or dashboard)

The trucks always go to “Safe” whenever their Google or CB Or Phone Network   alerts “Speed Trap ahead

You don’t see big trucks pulled over often, but when you are catching up to all the trucks that passed you a while ago you know there is a police presence nearby. Me I have to speed up to do the speed limit...

Now the semi that had its starboard side on the pavement and its 18 wheels pointing north in the east bound lanes of I 10 looked peculiar laying there like that. It takes you a minute or two to realize just what it is you are looking at

Different Perspective Of A Truck

And then another minute to wonder how it got like that. I wonder if setting it back on its wheels had traffic backed up to the pacific ocean?

You see strange things in the desert. Like the huge prison in Arizona that has so many lights that you realize that this is not a night sky prison.

To Many Lights To Be A Night Sky Prisons

Night sky prisons could do a lot of good, teaching the inmates astronomy. Its science and it would be better than letting them study the bible, and if there are some murders in the dark, well more textbooks to go around to the serious future scientists.

Out in the desert 50 miles out of Phoenix I spotted a massive steaming something, that turned out to be the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, and according to its web site it is safer, and cleaner than any Arizona republican, and at 32 million megawatt hours, annually it delivers some energy.

I know why you might build a nuclear plant near an ocean, or large lake, it’s because you need the water to make steam to turn the turban, and to cool the thing to keep it from blowing up. Not that a huge nuclear explosion 50 miles outside of Phoenix would be noticed all that much, well except for all the guns and gun stores that  would melt, and oh and the lawns that would turn brown.

Miss Atomic Bomb 1950

The people that built Palo Verde knew they needed water and so, they pipe in millions of gallons of treated wastewater from Phoenix. Now that is clever.  Arizonans next time you turn on that air condoner, go flush the toilet, and quit watering that lawn. You live in the desert, and your source of water is going dryer than some backwater county in the south.