Ian Rambles
The bottle ranch was a lot more effective in the afternoon sun than the photos suggest with strong shadows and light transmitted through the glass.

Fiona's Journal
By 9.30 this morning when we went for our morning swim it was already 100 degrees ouside and the paving stones were too hot to walk on barefoot. A guy, who was swimming with his three young daughters, told me he had been at work on a building site from four this morning but the entire workforce had been sent home because it was too hot to work safely. And this is only mid June so what will it be like in July and August I wonder!

We headed South out of Vegas and within minutes we are out into desolate scorching sandy desert. Las Vegas is such an anomaly, an oasis of hedonistic pleasures and conspicuous consumption in the midst of the barren and pitiless Nevada desert. It says something about the human species' stubborn determination to get some fun out of life, even in the harshest of environments. Or perhaps about the lengths they will go to to circumvent the anti-gambling legislation of other States!

Soon we had rejoined Route 66 and were into California, having merely sliced the very tip of Nevada. We headed West across the Mojave desert. This is even more classically desert-like than the previous deserts consisting of yellow sand as far as the eye can see, sparsely dotted with small shrubs and succulents and shimmering in a 112 degree heat haze. We did some Interstate but also a lot of old Route 66 which criss-crossed the busy railway tracks. We have been amazed by the length of some of the goods trains and we managed count the trucks on one as we waited for it to pass at a level crossing. There were 120 trucks and 4 engines. At about 60' per unit we made that over a mile and a quarter long. We tried to confirm this at a point where the road ran directly alongside the rail track for a good long stretch. First we kept pace with the train for a few minutes and thereby established that it was doing exactly 55mph. Then we dropped back until the nose of our car was exactly level with the tail end of the train and then sped up to 60 mph ie we were overtaking it by exactly 5 mph, the idea being that we would time how long it took until our nose was exactly level with the front of the train and then we could calculate from that how long the train was. We were scuppered however by the road becoming too uneven for us to maintain 60mph safely, and the small detail that we all of us forgot to record the start time! My Mum (a retired maths teacher) would appreciate this impromptu maths lesson. Other readers may well just think we have succumbed to desert fever!

Late in the afternoon we followed Sean's directions off the Interstate in order to rejoin Route 66 at Helendale – Sean is the Irishman in our SatNav who gives the spoken directions. He led us onto a road that does not exist in our road atlas or in our Route 66 guide book and it barely exists in real life! It is a very rough dirt track across the desert and at one point its path became almost undetectable but it did indeed bring us eventually to Helendale and back onto Route 66. We felt very intrepid. Just West of Helendale we stopped at “Bottle Tree Ranch” which, I suppose we should call an Art Installation. It was quite magical and I hope we got some decent pictures that do it justice. Ian had a chat with its creator Elmer Long who just happened to be on site working on the next addition to his forest.

Arthur's Log:
Looking back at Vegas as we sped on across the desert you could see it was in the middle of nowere. There is nothing around it except miles of desert with mountains on the horizon.

Mojave desert, barron and endless with nothing but yellow sand and blue cloudless skys for mile after mile. About halfway across the desert it hit 120 farenheight (45 celsius)

Sean (prononced Shawn), our satnav, found a short cut through a gravel pit with a barley visible track, there was empty bottles and cans of beer everywere but there were 10 times as many shot gun shells and every now and then we saw a dead animal rotting in a bush.

The Harry Report
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George's Musings
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