This land is my land

One of the best days ever.

We had so much fun in Sequoia National Park playing among the big trees and trying to use our camera lenses. We drove to the park from Visalia Elks Lodge where we are camped.On the way we noticed how thoughtful the farmers were. For us city-folk, they had signs on fences telling what was being grown.We passed orange groves,

 lemon groves, grapefruit trees, walnut trees, almond trees, and kiwi. Kiwi is a tricky thing. The fields look like vineyards.

We had two things on our must do list: to drive our truck through a tree intentionally without getting hurt and to see the largest tree in the USA. We did both successfully.  There was still snow on the ground

up in the higher elevations even though the temperature was in the 80's at the base of the mountains and in the high 50's up near 6000 ft.
I must say the road should win some sort of prize for all the twists and turns. The forest ranger said some people turn and come back due to the roads, but not us! We had a  list and we were going to do it.

How I spent my day:

The tunnel tree

The largest tree

One of many twists and turns

Speed dating

Today was our day to go exploring. I had studied the maps and the books and mapped out our trip. Me? why does he let me do these things? But off we go. I want to go to the date farm and Death Valley.But Death Valley is too big to do all in one day so we decided to go to Badwater, the lowest point in the Western hemisphere.
As most of you know I am very "distance challenged". It is only this far on the map is my favorite saying when having to plan these things. But we had already traveled from the Atlantic side of the USA and I was not about to stop.

 So far so good. Then we reach the dirt road to the farm. Dirt roads here are not like the ones in the South. Here they are hard as rocks and white dust is everywhere. Plus they spare no expense on road signs. We were on a windy road often times not being able to see what was on the other side of the curve. Plus this place is down, down down.

 The sign below is one of Mr. Fixit's favorite saying. In case it is too small to read: "No matter where you go, there you are."

No outside parties here.

Still iced in. Not quite as cold, but ice is everywhere. We only got the tip of the storm.Midlands and Odessa really got hit...Plus they have the weather people telling them how bad it is. Our lights have flickered but so far we still have power. We have been working on a jigsaw puzzle.

All New Years Eve festivities have been cancelled in the area.

A Little Ice... I think not.

As most of you know our favorite place to camp is in Fort Davis, Texas. There is absolutely nothing there except quiet, good smelling air, no radio station, no TV station.I don't even know if they have a a police department or fire station. So when you are cut off from the world you can't worry about things over which you have no control.

We drove in on a beautiful day. We set up , no problems and waited til the next day to go looking around. We drove to Alpine and to Marfa.

In Marfa we decided to have lunch. We drove around that 3 block town for about 4 circles before we finally spotted a diner/cafe. In we go.The menu was very limited....organic beef meatloaf, grilled chicken and vegetables of the day. The servers say they start serving at 11 and when it's gone it's gone and they run out every day.

As we were leaving the wind got colder and the sun started disappearing.
No fools..we hotfooted it home.
The next morning we thought we had turned left into the Arctic Circle. I don't think I have ever been soooooo cold.There was ice everywhere. Our steps were frozen, the poor trees were bent down from the weight. But ya know we did not have some ditzy weather woman showing us what ice looked like or telling us to stay off the roads while she drove all over the county. Nice.

Straight down the road

For most of this trip we have been on I-10. The speed limit is 80 and we are going 65. So everything is passing us. But we get to see  and take pictures. Plus we have seen many cars stopped by the Texas Hiway Patrol

. Guess 80 is just not fast enough on this long straight road. We also passed this huge wind farm, Desert Sky Wind Farm. I think the website said it had 160 units.

Highways

We traveled from Seguin to Ozona. What a small town! It is right off I-10. We had stopped here once before, but this time we stayed for the night. That was quite long enough. On the road again.

Seguin Part 2

We found all kinds of fun things to look at. Of course, my love of animals and Mr. Fixit's patience led to this: