Travel Day

I'll be on the road a good bit today. Headed north to Kingman/Bullhead City, AZ for a follow-up, then to Lake Havasu to meet with the recruiter there, then to Needles, CA for an appointment with a kid who wants to work on the railroad ('Till Gabirel blows his horn).

Something I love about AZ, and it's also something I hate, is that the roads are open and quiet. I love it because you can put the cruise control at about 80 and only need to adjust it when going through some dot on the map. The mountains, hills, valleys, and canyons make for some time wasters as well. Although it's been well over a decade I do find geology interesting and I'm curious where some of the stratification in the rocks out here come from. You'll see strips of different colored rock interwoven into the cuts for the highway and I'm curious what happened during that epoch which made the rock look different. Was it from a time when AZ was underwater? Or from a time when AZ was located where the west coast of Africa is now? It's neat and it keeps me attentive.

However I do hate the single lane road. You get behind some RV and you'll be doing 50 for the next half hour until you're lucky enough to pass, or hit a passing lane. Supposedly they're going to work on widening the roads out there to improve the Phoenix-Vegas corridor, but that won't help me today.

I just learned what a Joshua tree was. Hooray learning!

I'll be driving through the Joshua Tree National Forest. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these up close, but they are a really weird looking plant. It's like a cactus, pine tree, and a palm tree got drunk one night and had some sort of plant threeway. And that reminds me of another weird drunken night. Don't look at me like that. It's funny.

Anyway, didn't sleep very well last night so I'm actually going to try and snag another hour of shut-eye. I shouldn't have had that cup of coffee first though.

*UPDATE*

Apparently a couple folks have had exposure to the Joshua tree. I had no idea. One of the people is a young NCO currently going through the ARC. I can't speak for any other recruiters, but they're just so damned cute when they come out of ARC. All thinking everyone is going to join. The bestest part is the new story being told about how if you write 50 contracts you're allowed to go back to the Army.