Random road ruminations on I-5 in California

Central California roadside fruit stand

402 miles of driving sets the mind to wandering. Here’s where mine went today while driving from LAX to Novato, California, for an overnight before stage 1 of the 2012 Amgen Tour of California.

Leaving gritty LA hot streets from the airport, rising out of the fog or smog into the Angeles forest, looks like Colorado country except with orangy-yellow earth.

Powerline tower looks like the outline of a cap sleeve dress for a giantess.

Taking notes in the car like this makes some passengers nervous. I tell them I do it all the time but it doesn’t make them feel any better.

Mini oil drills like bug-eyed rusty enormous flies drinking. Creosote.

Flat as the eye can see to my left. Like Indiana flat. Cheeries, grape vines, infinite rows of fruit trees and long skinny lines of low to the ground greenery. I’m glad someone can live out here and do this work to feed us, because I couldn’t live in a place this flat.

While passing the kind of perforated truck trailer that hauls cattle — the cows must have to pee at some time on the road. I wonder if they could spray a windshield. Maybe not pass too close.

Thousands of cows milling around bored in bare dirt corrals, standing, lying down, or feeding. So many cows silt from under their hooves hangs in the air over the road like a fine mist. 

IKEA in the middle of nowhere.

Sign: Harris Ranch — wireless internet. You can be in the middle of nowhere and go anywhere.

Workers making their ways along the rows of green, bending, rising, bending.

Alex Howes, Tom Peterson, Nathan Haas, and Tom Danielson seem to ride together in the same races alot, Cali, Langkawi. TDF? Too young maybe.

Church, when to go to church tomorrow.

Baby vines — or are they orchard trees, look like Peanuts character Frieda’s naturally curly hair on a lollipop stick.

Swallows nesting in the overpasses swoop out by the dozens and swing back to their nests.

The clouds got teased-out dos at the hairdresser’s today.