Sedona

[furtech]

I left Los Angeles late (surprise!), around three. Never stop in at work on your way out of town for a vacation...

Thanks to GPS and 70mph speed limits, the drive out of California was effortless and happily brain-off. Satellite radio, a loaded iPod and company (even a snoozing border collie) made the miles fly by.

As one could guess, the drive through that part of California (along I-10) is pretty dull: barren and blasted, broken only by the crumbly shapes of long-dead cinder cones. This monotony made the appearance of the windmill generators all the more startling:



Out of nowhere there appear giant, white windmills . A hundred feet tall? I don't know, but they seem huge and their elegant vanes rotate slowly, adding to the effect of their size and numbers . I had a sci-fi moment driving through them...

I arrived in Sedona well after dark, hooking up with the wonderful JC and getting the room key from her. I settled Rondo in and crashed. The only mishap was when Rondo ran into a field to pee...and discovered it was covered with goathead/puncture-vine. He froze (I went in and un-punctured him) and then he refused to pee (even in the bushes of a veterinary clinic!).

All of the area around Sedona is beautiful. This is the view out the back of our hotel ($49 for a single!) at dawn:


The next morning I woke early to take Rondo out to do his business. I have no idea how he held it for over 16 hours. He was still reluctant to pee anywhere (still remembering the goatheads) so I walked him down a neighborhood street (goathead-free). *Finally* he found a place worthy of doing his business. A tiny shrub got the full drenching, several minutes long-- as I nervously looked at the $$$ house we were in front of, praying that the owners didn't see us drowning his $$$ landscaping. I could just picture the garage door opening and an irate person glaring at the never-ending stream.

When Rondo finally finished, we scurried away up the road. Near the top of a rise I saw a dream house:


I can only imagine what it must be like to wake up to this view .

The little street where Rondo finally pee'd was thereafter known as "P Street" because that became his favorite place to do his business. Can you imagine driving home down this road? Or living in a place like this? Incredible.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

We drove through Altamont Pass on Sunday on the way back from vintacon. Winds were up, and nearly all the windmills (including the old square-sail ones) were spinning. I think they've taken down all the old eggbeater windmills, though.

Altamont has a few of the new slower "low environmental impact" windmills like you saw, and I think we'll see more of the wind farmers there converting as older windmills fail.

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

I don't know if all the killer windmills have come down yet.

Altamont Pass is a major bird migration route - guess what wins? :(

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Most of the windmills at Altamont are still the high-speed models. Some of them are decades old.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Good to hear about the installation of the low-impact windmill designs. I'd never seen these before; I remember the fast spinners and eggbeaters in Altamont but it's been a while since I've been through that pass and this may have been my first trip through.