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| Brawley City Hall, Brawley, CA |
Monday, January 14, was our first day off the bike. We walked through the town and found the classic city hall shown here. The weather was unseasonably cold and windy.
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| Fields of alfalfa outside Brawley, CA |
We left Brawley just after sunrise on a very cold morning,
hoping to reach Blythe, 90 miles to the east, by sunset but strong head winds
and rollers from hell (think doing multiples of the Texas dip) got in our way. The
first part was smooth going through Imperial County’s farming areas with alfalfa
and other green crops, and then we found sand.
We were in the Imperial Sand Dune Recreation Area near Glamis. The dunes went on for miles, along with the
ATVs, and the farming was behind us – until the next plateau.
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| Imperial Sand Dunes outside Gleams |
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| Plowing sand off the highway |
Then the rollers and wind hit us. At 2 PM we were still 40+ miles from Blythe
so we hitched a ride in a pickup truck from the immigration check point into
Blythe. The drive took us past some of
the poorest farm communities we have ever seen.
Cotton appears to be the main crop.
Pods of cotton littered the side of the road and there were bales the
size of a small railroad container around many of the fields.
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| Hank at the Colorado River |
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| Entrance to Quartzsite Yacht Club |
After our Brawley to Blythe misadventure we decided to split
our next day’s planned ride into two days.
From Blythe we crossed the Colorado River and climbed into the mountains
on Interstate 10. It was actually a
nice ride, with wide shoulders and smooth steady climb with none of the rollers
from the day before. Our destination was
Quartzsite, AZ, which is little more than a site for retired RVers to hang out for
the winter. Our lodging was in half of a
prefab trailer at the Quartzsite Yacht Club. (There is no body of water within
25 miles of Quartzsite; it is in the middle of a high desert.) We met the Yacht Club owner at dinner that
night. Seems his father bought the bar
back in the 70’s and had the absurd the idea of the yacht club, selling
memberships for $10, which included a membership card and a tee shirt. Rumor has it that some members have used the
membership card for reciprocity privileges at real yacht clubs. Anyway, the food was great, the lodging
comfortable and we had a red sunrise over the desert.
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| Cafe, Quilt Shop, Plumbing and Electrical Supplies in Brenda, AZ |
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| Westward Motel in Salome, AZ |
From Quartzsite we continued east on route 60 across more
high desert, passing through Brenda where we stopped for lemonade at the cafe below.
Our destination for the day was Salome, a tiny community in the high desert with very limited services. Our hotel, the Westward Hotel, had four rooms and
didn’t look like much from the outside but was nicely decorated on the inside
with antique furniture, an Indian pattern rug, a cattle hide rug and a gas pot
belly stove for heat. It was very
pleasant!
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| Cactus growing on the hillsides east of Salome, AZ |
From Salome we continued east on route 60 across 45 miles of
monotonous oil and gravel road across the high desert. In 45 miles our Garmin recorded 1 ft. of
elevation change. After a short climb we
descended into Wickenburg, AZ, and civilization.
Our Saturday ride from Wickenburg, into Phoenix was delightful,
with smooth roads, no wind, warmer temperatures, and a slight downward grade. The scenery was still rolling desert scrub,
cactus, and now horse ranches.
We’re now on the west side of Phoenix, heading out Mon.
morning to cross the city and back into the hills east of Phoenix.
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