Well, here we are, at the end of my adventure to Arizona to visit my daughter. I got to be a monk for a day, and spend some quality time with my kid. And now, in case you have never before witnessed an actual mirage, please pay attention to this photo…

If you look closely at the black car… no, not the silver one, the black one further up the highway… yes… now look underneath it… see what looks like water and a reflection of the car? The lines of the freeway vanish, and you can even see a reflection of that green sign to the right, too… no… not that one, the one to the left of that… That false water is an actual mirage, a trick of heat and bouncing light waves. Now, this wasn’t a particularly hot day, not by desert standards. But normally, dull black asphalt does not reflect anything. It isn’t shiny. But dark things do absorb heat, and this magnifies the effect. I have seen mirages on flat sand when it is really hot. It looks like a huge lake. I can totally see how somebody who was dying of thirst and going a little crazy would wander towards that refreshing water until they dropped dead.

So, I left Arizona… another 6-hour drive back to San Diego, full of stuff I have seen quite a few times… and your mind starts to wander… especially mine… because it is full of crack squirrels… and they get bored…

Yeah, see all those tire tracks on the dunes… I hate that people get ATVs and just go out to tear up the desert.

My Spanish is not that good, despite the fact that I live 20 minutes form the Mexican border… but every time I stop at this rest area, I can’t help wondering if it is really named after a guy called ‘Fat Jimmy’ Sunbeam.

One of my favorite parts of this long drive is when you start to climb back over the mountains into San Diego. These are some crazy rocks… how did the pioneers ever get over these in wagons.

I mean, they came all this way, and then this…

At the top of the first big mountain, there is a sign for the ‘Desert View Castle’.

Now, I have driven by that exit hundreds of times over the years, but this time, I decided to get off and see the castle… and it was what I expected, a tourist trap. I didn’t even go inside.

I just snapped a few pictures to share…

Of the ‘desert view’…

And frankly, after driving through desert, and walking in desert, for the whole weekend, I wasn’t impressed… but I am glad I pulled off the freeway…

Because, on the road to the ‘castle’… I saw all this…

It was all just lined up by the road in front of a few rundown old trailers and motor homes…

In a weird way, this sums up California…

Because most of the crazy people in the world end up living in California sooner or later…

And the really crazy ones end up living in the desert…