Wordless Wednesday 03-21-18

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From Tucson - homeward bound Posted 02-13-18

Regardless of how great a trip is, there is always the time one must head home. 

From the awesome landscape of the Tanque Verde Ranch where the classes ended at 4pm...

...an hour drive in traffic to get to I-10 and the rush hour traffic headed north toward Pheonix, which is where the smog in the distance comes from. 

Beyond that was the sun setting in a blaze of glory to the west. 

And too quickly disappearing into the horizon. 

After an overnight in Yuma, I continued on I-8 and drove past this solar farm - the black on the right of the picture. 

It is vast, miles along the highway, and here you can see the solar panels tilted to the sun. 

Not many miles further on the forest of a wind turbine farm appears at the foothills. 

They are widely spaced here, where some wind farms are very dense, just enough space between towers to clear the other arms flailing. 

In the vast landscape they don't seem so large, but up close they tower like redwoods in the sky.  Also along I-8 are wide spread fields of row crops that are harvested for markets all over the world.  Lettuce, celery, broccoli, beets, etc., all grow in the winter sun.   Driving out to Yuma I saw a flock of about 20 egrets resting along an irrigation canal. 

After the veggie, sun, and wind farms comes the true low desert....

...which goes on and on and on and on and.............................!

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Road Trip - Indiana Davenport, Iowa to Omaha, NE 07-23-14

Lots of pictures tonight to make up for the paucity of yesterday.  Several views of the same thing to give the subject clarity.

What kind of a creature is this? 

It was at one of the entrances to the University of Iowa and I was thinking it might be a Jayhawk, but that is the Uof Kansas mascot.  Wikipedia says that Iowa is the Hawkeyes - so I suppose this is supposed to be a hawk.  Weird.

I have been trying to figure out what these lines in the fast lane of traffic are for- they go across the lane rather than between the lanes, but are about the same length.  I saw a sign about a pavement paint test way on the other side of Iowa and can't believe they need hundreds of miles of paint tests.   Maybe they are markers for tracking speeders by plane, but I wonder if they could be seen from the air and, besides, there were no signs warning of  "the eye in the sky".   The lines are 10 to 12 seconds apart at 70mph.

There is part of one at the very top of the picture.  It is a real problem trying to photograph them! The line at the bottom is the lane separation line.  Any ideas?  

The most interesting thing I saw in Iowa is the Rest Stop with this towering wind turbine blade out front.  The gentleman at the bottom left had been taking pictures and I asked him if he would be in my picture to give an idea of the size of this thing.  We see them after they are installed and I have seen many on flatbed trucks on the highways, but to stand next to one is simply awesome.

Without the man there is no way to imagine the full size.

This old guy stopped to read the sign, giving me another comparison.

 

Inside, besides the toilets, vending machines and huge map of the state, there was a frieze of placards with comments about wind turbines, here are just a few.

 

This is a tile mosaic in the entry (between the outside door and the inside door) of a light bulb.  It even has the correct screw threads.  It is quite beautiful by my arms are not long enough to take a picture of the entire floor. 

Here are some turbines at work, just a few miles beyond the Rest Stop.

These turbines are mixed in with utility poles, but there are about a dozen in the image.

One thing I noticed a lot was the filthy cars on the road.  They have a sort of light tan mud, especially on the back windows.  I include this picture of a side road that is graded and I guess that is the natural color of the soil.  I can't imagine that they haul in dirt from somewhere else.  A car had just gone past on that road (traveling from left to right) and the dust it created still hangs on the right side of the picture.  I tried for a picture of the back of a dirty car, but they didn't come out.  You'll have to take my word for it!

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