There...and now back again, part one of a few.

So we're home now. Two weeks, nine states, six cupcakes, five campgrounds, uncounted cups of coffee, and one breakdown later, we're home. Photos to follow, with more at our Flickr site, but a quick recap since the last post.
We left LA Monday morning, heading east on I-10 to see the dinosaurs in Cabazon. The dinos, which were in the movie Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, are enormous. There's a T-Rex and what I think is an Apatasaur, but it's been a while since Paleo 101. They're part of a small truckstop complex, but were recently sold and are now a creationist museum...so they're God-fearing dinosaurs, which raises all kinds of interesting paleological, biological, and spiritual questions. Whatever the dinosaurs' beliefs, they make amazing pie. We ate in the truckstop cafe next to the dinos, and had fantastic six-inch tall homemade slabs of cream of coconut and cream of banana. That was followed by an excursion to the Salton Sea.
The Salton Sea is an ecological disaster and a nature preserve, an abandoned resort area and a hotspot for photographers. It's one of the strangest and most beautiful places I've ever been to. Also, according to Dan, one of the smelliest. I was getting over a cold and was fortunately too congested to smell the combination of hypersaline water, dead and dying fish, and baking beaches. It's now a bird sanctuary, and we must have seen 1000's of pelicans, kestrels, gulls, herons, cranes...other than that, it was almost totally silent. Photos to follow - words can't really do justice to the strangeness and isolation of the place. Suffice to say, we both want to go back, but maybe stay more downwind next time.
After tooling around the Salton Sea and environs for a while, listening to Calexico or just to nothing, we left the sun behind and followed our GPS back to the interstate and headed east with the intention of making Arizona that night, and finding a decent campground. Somewhere in the Mojave, something in my car's turbo system went boom, but we didn't realize it until we stopped for supplies in a tiny town on the border of California and Arizona, and then tried to get going again. Turns out, even a tiny car with a diesel engine won't go very far without its turbo. We limped a couple of miles down I-10 until we got to a KOA campground, within sight of Arizona. Literally. The Colorado River was the eastern border of both the state of California and the campground. The next morning and into afternoon, after consulting with our mechanic back home, Dan wrestled with hoses and zip ties and tools in the very tight engine compartment, and finally found the right combination of four-letter words and zip ties to get us back on the road. The people at the KOA were very nice about lending us tools and letting us stay past check-out time without extra charges, and we motored on to Phoenix, to a mechanic our mechanic had recommended.
Of all the places we touched down in, Phoenix was the hottest. We got there late afternoon, and it was 97 roasting degrees. The mechanics at the shop lifted the hood, and said the repair job was the best side-of-the-road job they'd ever seen, and as good as anything they could do in their shop with their lifts and power tools. They praised Dan's McGyver-like abilities to fix cars at campsites with nothing more than a hammer, screwdriver, and a couple of wrenches, noted that zip ties were used to fix cars at race tracks all the time, and said he could finish the job no problem once we got home and ordered the part. Dan was very pleased with himself, as well he should be, but after that ordeal, I doubt he'll be lifting the hood to do much more than add windshield washer fluid. He may be handy, but he's not a gearhead by choice.
After leaving Phoenix with our car, now pronounced healthy and fit to go the next 1800 miles, we headed north and up into Flagstaff. Between the sun going down, and climbing nearly 7000' into the mountains, the temperature dropped almost 60 degrees. We actually had to bundle up to set up our tent, but because of dry conditions and the fire risk, we didn't set a campfire. The campsite was great, an old one right on Rt 66 just outside of Flagstaff, and completely surrounded by pine trees. And all the way up, we saw Saguaro cacti! Hundreds of them, standing silently by the road with their arms raised. Pretty amazing. Neither one of us had ever seen Saguaros before.
So that was the first couple of days out of LA. Wednesday on, it was less eventful, but still great. More to follow in the next installment! And photos!