Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

STILL 100 miles to go?

6 April - Bakersfield, CA

Back in California, and civilisation begins to reassert itself - this hotel has in-room wireless Internet access, so I can work with a decently fast connection once again.

Having hit the road at about 6:45 this morning in order to avoid the traffic and resisting the urge to 'accidentally' bang loudly on the next door to mine on the way out after its inhabitants kept me awake until god knows when last night, I headed straight down towards The Hoover Dam - sorry, Hoover Dam. I keep forgetting that this is the land of no definite articles.

The road gets narrower and windier past Boulder City, and in these nervous times there's a police checkpoint on the approach to the Dam. Once there, there's a spanky new multi-storey car park and visitor's centre in the same art-deco style as the dam itself. It is very, very well worth paying the $10 for the tour - the presentations and so on I can take or leave, but the chance to descend 500ft through the rock of Boulder Canyon in an elevator to go and ogle the turbines shouldn't be missed. It's an absolutely spectacular piece of civil (and, lest we forget, electrical) engineering, and a bit of geeking at heavy machinery and millions of tons of concrete was a breath of fresh air after the plastic ambience of Las Vegas. It's a real shame that the far more detailed hard-hat tours were discontinued after September 11th 2001. The tour takes place on the Nevada side of the dam - the state line runs down the middle of the river, so the other side of the dam is in Arizona.

There's not much I can say about this amazing piece of engineering that isn't written elsewhere (the dam's website referenced above has comprehensive numbers and lots of cool pictures), but one thing that's really fantastic is the star map embedded in the pavement around the dedication monument. This map reflects the night sky as it was on the day the dam was dedicated in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and what's really cool about it is that they took the trouble to inlay a long text explaining how distances to stars are measured, all done in shiny metal letters in a fantastic Art Deco typeface. Most people just walk over this, but I do recommend looking down when you do.

Another good idea is to go early - I got there just after opening time and the crowds arrive not long after that, so by the time I left at about 11:30 things were absolutely heaving.

With the engineering detour out of the way it was time to head west again. Unfortunately, this involved a long slog on a busy, high-pressure I-15 from Las Vegas to Barstow, followed by a long slog on a busy US-58 from Barstow to Bakersfield, followed by getting lost in Bakersfield to the extent that I had to ring the hotel for directions, so I think it's best to draw a veil over this bit of the journey other than to mention that it was also a much longer journey than it appeared to be on the map - when I was expecting to find Bakersfield about half an hour away I passed a sign saying it was 103 miles away, and my heart sank.

It would be rude not to mention the cool things I saw on the way, though:

• Loads of Joshua trees (no, not the U2 album)


• The exit from I-15 for the fantastically-named Zzyzx Road


• The rows of stored airliners at Mojave airport - the hot, dry desert air makes for perfect storage conditions


• A sign off the road to a solar power plant - unfortunately, the road ran out after a while without any sign of the power plant, so I had to give up. Bah.


• To round off a day of alternative power sources, the wind farms on the Tehachapi Pass


• Lots and lots of trains - hugely long trains of containers stacked two high (the loading gauge here is much, much larger than the UK, evidently), usually hauled by three or four growling BNSF diesels with those enormously loud five-tone horns American locomotives have (Check out the first recording listed on that page - it sounds alarmingly like the soundtrack to 2001). And the bells which go ding-ding-ding. There's a lot of rail traffic in this part of California.

Tomorrow - well, tomorrow I'm going to head west to the coast and up the first stage of SR-1 back towards San Francisco. It's likely I'll be back in the city a day early at this rate.

Posted by mpk at April 7, 2004 7:17 AM | TrackBack