February 28

From AZ to CA... I-8 passes through the most beautiful sand dunes, in Imperial County. And the rain hadn't hurt that a bit. In fact it made them just a bit deeper in color. They are what you thought the desert was... before you saw it for the first time. Sand. Piles and Piles of it. And such a scrumptious color.

At highway 98 we decided to leave the interstate and go south and west through Calexico. The road was good and it was an interesting ride. Calexico is bigger than I thought it would be and seemed like a nice place. I guess we hear so much about 'border towns' it taints reality a bit.

When 94 junctioned at I-8 again we decided to go by freeway over the mountains as the weather was deteriorating and the map made highway 94 look pretty twisty, although the mountain passes were not as high.

The freeway goes just below the Anza Borrego Desert State Park boundary and heads up the mountains into Cleveland National Forest. Looks pretty normal on the map in the atlas but ... wow... it doesn't look normal in person!

From the point just west of Ocotillo where we entered the In-Ko-Pah Gorge through the Jacumba Mountains we saw the most amazing mountains... they are made of piled up rocks. It looks as though they were stacked there by some giant... piles and piles of them. Not sharp jagged rocks but rounded, smooth ones that look like huge pebbles. Not much was growing on these mountains of rocks but every once in a while there was a saguaro or other spindly cactus or shrub, but mostly it was just rocks piled on rocks. For miles. Beautiful.

We topped Tecate Summit at 4140' and went up and down over several other ranges with off and on smatterings of rain hitting us. It was cold, but no snow! Then into urbanization... houses, RV Parks, shopping centers. We had gone as far west as we needed to and were headed back east on highway 94 to

Jamul (pronounced Humool... we were told) and then to the Pio Pico Thousand Trails preserve hidden away in the Jamul Mountains along Otay Lakes Road. We were a day early and the south side of preserve where the full hook-ups are was full... we were to wait on the north side until the next day when there would be room for us. I kind of think of it as being in purgatory... waiting to get into heaven... and into heaven we got. I don't know how they pick the sites for the folks on the waiting list, but we lucked out. After the one in Yuma ANYTHING would have been better, but this is excellent. Immediately behind us is a footbridge that crosses an dry creekbed to the 18 hole putting course, spa and swimming pool. How great is that! Now the weatherman says it's going to start raining again Saturday and rain until Thursday!