We were up and out of the house at 9 a.m. and on our way – we were in California within a few minutes (Yah, I live that close) and out over the scab lands and terrain that leads to Death Valley if we turned right and Tecopa if we turned left.  When we hit the festival about 5 vendors in a parking lot of a hot springs resort that is quiet and unsophisticated was all there was to the whole production.  There’s an office/art gallery of sorts and a ‘Bistro’ behind it in the parking lot too.

We went to the Bistro for some breakfast and as luck would have it, it took forever to get our food, it was a bit weird to me since I ordered french toast with fruit and it came back with some kind of bacon and everything was covered in syrup, including the bacon.  Bistro?  Guess they figure everyone likes a gallon or so of syrup on their morning meal. Of course I ran into a poker player…he’s the cook.  He may be the owner too.  He used to play at Bellagio all the time.  The waitress said he now plays at the Pahrump Nugget.

We stared at some of the vendor’s stuff, I tried to buy a metal turtle for my yard landscaping but they wanted to much for it, Jennie bought a bar of handmade soap, and that was about the size of it.  We headed on out toward the China Ranch.  At another fork in the road we turned right – away from the China Ranch just because sis wanted to see if it went anywhere.  It looked like it went somewhere but not where we wanted to go.  But we got a cool picture out of it.  There’s an immense amount of water in the area. We crossed a big wash and this is what it looked like on one side of the road:

and this is what it looked like on the other:

And then we were back to our trip to China Ranch.  Almost as soon as we turned onto the road we started dropping into the canyon. There were closed, wire covered mine shafts along the canyon walls in some places. And we went from curving downgrade to the date farm, gift shop, and a variety of buildings and people coming and going almost before we knew it.

The dates are wearing clothes, I figure these people shop thrift stores:

It is incredibly beautiful, seeing the contrast of the mountains in the background and all of the green in our surrounding area.

We found a warning about a baby alligator being lost in the valley and sure enough, we found him in the creek as we wandered down a trail.

It was funny, we were going the opposite direction of the arrows when we hit the trail.  I said, “Oh look, there’s an alligator in the water.”

My sis accused me of being mean and trying to scare baby Rain.  I said, “No, there really is one.”  I was off the hook when they saw it too.  Then we found the sign.

We watched something going on with one of the biggest domestic cats I can remember seeing, it had been down by the gift shop and then was up in the wall of the canyon in a niche and the ravens were spread out along wall…waiting.  When the cat started down, two of the ravens swooped down right over its head, nearly hitting it as they zoomed in.

Yes, I looked under the skirt/shirt of one of the date clusters.

Another cluster on another tree had lost its covering completely:

It was fun, it was different, it’s worth another trip or two, just to do some looking and hiking around the area. And we had a date milkshake at the gift shop…not bad at all.

Before we hit Tecopa, we saw one of the signs that tells you which organization is responsible for clean-up of that section of highway…The Tecopa Yacht Club!  Really?  I can’t figure where the yacht club is.

Laters…