I have to drive BACK?!?!

We made it to the Bay area in 19 days of travel, which even by my quickly atrophying calculational ability gives me only nine days of travel to make it back. OMG. Also, Lynn left for DC this morning, so I'm on my own with my three daughters again. Nice, but I'm in for it. The question is how to make the trip endurable.

My three girls have fortunately taken the road warrior ethos to heart. I tell them that we have three hours left to get somewhere, and the response is, "oh, that's nothing!"

You hear that the west is defined by water, but I found it hard to wrap my head around that until I drove through it. Our drive started out going through the San Luis reservoir, which is an enourmous facility devoted to watering the Central Valley. We then drove through field after field of almond and pistachio trees. We saw trailer trucks laden with apricots. We saw signs decrying Barbara Boxer for taking water from the Central Valley. Next to green groves of trees is a harsh treeless, almost brushless desert.

On the way from the Bay Area to the Grand Canyon is Visalia, California, which happens to be the location for one of Logos Technologies' biorefining plants. So I asked for a visit, and was met at the door by Rahul Mirani, who kindly showed me around. Essentially what the plant is doing is converting corn stover, which has cellulose and lignin combined, into ethanol. There's some cooking in vats, mechanical separation in blenders, and of course brewing and distilling. All very interesting, and especially the hints of the secret sauce that goes into it. If this plant goes well, it will cause a huge upset in the production of ethanol. Looking forward to success.

The day was capped by our nighttime investigation of a potential campsite at Mojave National Preserve. The website billed the roadside campsites as being just 6.1 miles off the highway and you could just go in and pick one. All we saw were scary dirt access roads littered with snake holes and ant colonies. In one of my best decisions of the trip, we abandoned the attemped and landed in a motel in Needles, California, hard on the Arizona border.