On the road: Day One

Mrs. Gerbil and I are en route to our new place in western Massachusetts. Today we drove from our lovely extended stay quarters in Emeryville, CA, to Kingman, AZ. (We had left our Berkeley apartment on New Year's Eve day to accommodate the landlords, but to accommodate our employers, we had remained in the Bay Area another week.)

Before today, I had never seen California's Central Valley, which was long and full of artificially irrigated orchards. Further down the road, while the sun was still up, Mrs. Gerbil and I enjoyed the Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, which we agreed looked like something out of Dr. Seuss.

Of course, we also noted a fair number of odd things. We saw an RV called the Citation, which we agreed was even better than the Intruder. We saw a billboard advertising a (poorly proofread but profoundly jerky-riffic) website, FreshJerky.com.

We spotted a restaurant in Barstow called Bun Boy. I am not making this up.


Finally, there is a rather large prison bus in the parking lot of our motel. Neither Mrs. Gerbil nor I wants to know what the Arizona Department of Corrections is doing on the premises.