NY Drive Day 3

The day dawned grey and cold and miserable - the dense fog Bakersfield greeted us with the night before had settled in for the long haul it seemed. We were glad to leave and headed sorta eastish, towards the desert.

As we started to climb out of Central Valley, the fog began to clear, revealing rolling green velvet hills. There were even some cows grazing in the paddocks! That required a photo - we are not used to this idea of cattle being able to graze on their right and proper food here in the US - we see too many intensive dairy and cattle farms.



The terrain became more rugged as we climbed a bit further, and more scenic.


Some of the mountains had snow on top!


Eventually we were high enough to see patches of snow around us. We passed a small town and headed for the desert. But first,




The vegetation suddenly changes - rainshadow I guess - and we saw our first Joshua Trees. Weird looking things but fairly typical of agaves.




This is the best pic we got in Mojave. I think it sums up our visit there - we came, we saw, we got out of this benighted place as soon as we could. It is on a vast desert plain and I cannot imagine how hot it would be in summer when the winds blow out of the desert towards the coast.

We left the land of the Joshua Tree behind and crossed the pass again.





We stopped in Tehachapi (te-*hatch*-a-pee) for lunch. It has a very good train shop, for reasons that were about to become abundantly evident to me. The hippy eatery at the east end of town fed us some very nice chili - it was even Lynne friendly (though not very hippy when i think about it cos it had meat in it). The sign shown above indicates how important the local train attraction is to the town. It also looks a little sad - the bare land behind it was until recently their railway museum. A fire razed it in 2008 just after it was completed.


We also saw this sign at another eatery - we sniggered quite a bit.

So why had we come here? To see the Tehachapi Loop, a 130-odd year old engineering marvel that lets trains negotiate the grade up the Tehachapi Pass. Trains are important in this household.

As we returned to our car, we heard dingdongs and a train horn! Oooh, we were in luck! This BNSF train was on its way west to the loop!


We dashed back to the car and took off towards the loop.

We were still beating the train to our date at the Tehachapi loop.

The road became a bit windy with patches of snow in the sheltered areas. Were we still beating the train? There was a chap selling souvenirs at a layby on the road. In talking to him we discovered we had to backtrack 100 yards and go along a little track to get the best view. Back we went to get that view!


The train looping around half the loop.




The train then winds around some more bends on its way to Central Valley.

(A picture without trains or trainlines in it for those not interested in trains)


And back we headed into Central Valley

to find a solar power plant designed by Aussie ingenuity (our pic shows little of consequence), and pass a bunch of turkey vultures (I got excited cos I thought they might be condors but condors don't feed in packs) and face RAIN and excitable cars before finding a place to stay in Oakhurst.