Day 14: Travel day
Welcome
Yesterday we drove from Bermuda Dunes, California, to Phoenix Arizona.
I began my day with a swim, just a brief immersion, enough to help my body into a conscious state. My breakfast was simple, a bowl of granola with milk and leftover berry compote, accompanied by a cup of hot coffee, unapologetically black and served in a mug, no room left for cream.
It was a morning filled with farewells as we said goodbye to the friends and family members who had joined us for the weekend. The van was packed and the trailer re-hitched and then Paul set out along quiet suburban streets, passing for a final time the gates and guard house of the Bermuda Dunes Country Club as we made our way towards the highway.
I-10 carried us east, the southernmost transcontinental highway in the US interstate system, a fine, four-lane road that was at times very smooth and at times very bumpy. It was a four-hundred mile drive across the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, distant mountains giving shape and perspective to an otherwise formless journey along this mostly straight road. Creosote bushes and bursage decorated the sand and clay of the desert floor and palm trees were now a distant memory, replaced by the defensive postures of lone cacti. We passed vast solar farms with their rows of angled panels and half-forgotten desert settlements populated by a cacophony of sun-baked trailers and decaying trucks. For the most part it was just highway and desert.
At the town of Ehrenburg we crossed the Colorado River and entered the state of Arizona, carried across this great waterway by a fairly ordinary vehicle bridge but earning a view of an impressive pipeline suspension bridge that carries the El Paso – Southern California Gas Line.
📷 Joseph Muench
After four hours we began to hit traffic and a cluster of skyscrapers gradually defined themselves on the horizon. We entered the city of Phoenix and found it to be very similar to how we left it, tall, bright, calm and not very busy, clean and tidy, broad streets dominated by driverless taxis and lumbering trams regularly uttering their piercing, wailing sirens to scare off any nearby vehicles. Our hotel was in downtown in a high rise and our rooms were on the eighth floor looking out to the south, a pleasant view across the city’s grid which stretches out until it is contained by a rocky range known as the South Mountains.
There was nothing in the schedule for the remainder of the day. I went for a run and explored a stretch of the Salt River which runs east to west below Phoenix’s downtown. The riverbed is largely dry - a dam east of the city diverts most of the flow for irrigation and drinking water - but there is a pleasant cycle path to jog along and plenty of greenery.
In the evening we dined at our usual Phoenix haunt, the Cornish Pasty Company, a public house that is so dedicated to pursuing the traditions surrounding its cuisine that the bar is almost completely dark, a few dim bulbs providing ambient light that is perhaps equivocal what you might find a hundred years ago in a southern English inn. The food was as good as we remembered and the beer was crisp and refreshing, served in a chilled glass, the way I like to enjoy it. There was an early night awaiting us and we walked back to the hotel to try our luck with the TV channels and gradually drift off to sleep.