Day 5 -- Bakersfield to Needles, California -- 272 Miles

When we're on the road, the first thing that we must decide after breakfast is "where do we want to go." In other words, assuming there exists a multitude of choices, "which direction do we want to drive." Concetta and I seldom have a destination goal except on a daily basis. This makes for less stress in the gotta-be-there-by-some-time-of-day category, but more stress in that there are more things to see and experience if we go down that particular road.

Today we had to decide if we wanted to leave Bakersfield and head directly east toward Needles, or did we want to grab Interstate 15 at some point and head for Las Vegas and Utah. I sort of preferred the latter as I figured it would ultimately be just too hot to head for the wilds of Arizona. But Concetta didn't want to go to Utah so here we are tonight in Needles, California.

I think the desk clerk at the Neddles KOA where we stopped about 3:30 told me that the temp was hovering around the mid nineties. I think she was right. It's hot for sure, but the clerk put us in a spot with a pretty-good-sized tree that's presently shading the living area of the RV. A gentle breeze is wafting through the windows and drinks out on our sandy patio area were quite nice.

We caught California Route 58 out of Bakersfield and stayed there most of the day as we headed east. Neither one of us had ever traveled Route 58 before, and it was quite an amazing experience. Loads of truck traffic were our downtown companions, but once we reached the outskirts of town, the hustle and bustle of truck traffic quieted down, and the landscape became one of verdant orchards and vineyards

Interestingly enough, we were never free of truck traffic for the next six and one half hours and 272 miles. It turned out, we decided, that Route 58 is a major arterial across central California, and our highway companions were big rigs. In fact, we estimated six out of every ten vehicles that we saw going either direction were 18-wheelers.

In all our travels over the past decade we somehow had never driven over Tehachapi Pass. Accourding to Wikipedia, "Tehachapi Pass (Kawaiisu: Tihachipia, meaning "hard climb") is a mountain pass crossing the Tehachapi Mountains in Kern County, California. Traditionally, the pass marks the northeast end of the Tehachapis and the south end of the Sierra Nevada range. The route is a principal connector between the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert."

Naturally, when you spend half the day grinding up hill after hill with big rigs along side the driver's side window, you know immediately what a "hard climb" is all about. We're very fortunate that we chose an RV with a gas-guzzeling V-10 engine. Our truck was able to keep up with and even outclimb most of the big rigs that were struggling alongside us.

One interesting thing I saw today that made me harken back to my days in the Carson City Railroad Association was the intricately-carved railroad right-of-ways through the Tehachapi canyon. Some of the most photogenic railroad grades I had ever seen were just a stone's throw outside our window, and I found myself longing for the days when I would have stopped and climbed down there to do some photography.

Once we reached the top of the pass at 4046 feet, driving got a bit more easy and we sailed along until we got to the town of Barstow at the crossroads of Interstate 15 and Route 58. Here we decided to have our lunch, and we fortuitously chose a bluff overlooking a trio of railroad tracks to pull over and stop. The tracks were about twenty feet below us, and I thought it would be cool if a train would happen by for a photograph.

Well, surprise, surprise. Not only was our perch atop the bluff perfect for "train spotting" photography, but the line down below us turned out to be primary artery, and a train speeding by in each direction would pass at least every 15 minutes. If you're not familiar with freight-born rail these days, a very large percentage of rail cargo conists of "Intermodal containers." Intermodal means that aside from being carried by flatbed freight cars, the cargo containers can be lifted off and placed on a flatbed truck for its final destination delivery.

While Concetta was whipping up a sandwich for me, I was out train-spotting. On my very first try, I was able to capture two trains from oppossing directions that flew by each other right beneath me. Interestingly enough, in addtion to the intermodal cars there were automobile-carrying cars, tank cars, covered hoppers, and boxcars of various descriptions. I was truly awed by the quantity of freight that was passing by me.

With lunch done, and the camera put away, we jumped back on Route 58 (which had become Intersate 40 at Barstow) and continued our eastward sojourn. Our eastbound highway companions continued to be largely trucks, and I was kept busy passing the slow ones and

staying out of the way of the more speedy ones. Out the window some pretty amazing desert scenery was beckoning, but we resisted the temptation to wander off the highway since we were not destined to get into Needles until after the usual cocktail hour.

So here we are at the Needles KOA, and everything is just fine. The entire grounds are the usual desert-country sand and gravel, but the various utility amenities were in place and seem to be working fine. It's hot, but not too hot, and the air is the usual crystal-clear desert variety that we have come to expect in the southwest. We've discovered that at this time of the year -- late April -- the camps we've visited are two thirds empty, and this KOA is no different. Even the camp in Pacifica had loads of empty spaces.

Tomorrow we will continue east on Interstate 40 and will probably end up in Flagstaff, Arizona. Flagstaff is a very memorable place for us as it conjures up memories of our first camping trip in 1977. In that year Concetta and I had only been together for less than a year, we weren't married, and had no idea what lay ahead for us. All we knew is that we wanted to go camping. So we loaded up her dangerously worn out 1964 VW Bug and headed for the Southwest. We stayed near Las Vegas on our way south, and on the third or fourth night we found a spot in a tiny camp in Flagstaff. The next morning the VW refused to start and we had to work together on the car to solve the problem. I'm sure it was about then we started to fall in love and forty-seven years later we're still in love. Such is the magic of camping!