Shabbos at our BLM camping site was nice.  The Arduino fan timer that our son and I built on Friday worked exactly as planned.  On a morning walk, I met a retired couple that is in their 9th year of full time RV living.  He’s quite the RV modifier as well, and has 12 batteries in his motorhome, compared to our two.  I’m only a little jealous.

While I was on the walk, the kids spotted a tarantula.  I’m very disappointed that I didn’t get to see it.

Today we left the RV and drove drove south to Salton City to rent ATVs.  Here’s everyone (except me) suited up:

The kids did a test run in the lot:

We headed out into the Ocotillo SVRA (State Vehicle Recreation Area):

Our first stop was an area of geologic interest called Pumpkin Patch.  These sandstone spheres are concretions; like pearls, minerals in the water come out of solution and deposit themselves onto a “seed”, like a bone or a small pebble.  Layer upon layer is deposited, and the concretions grow to the size shown here:

We were out for four hours and had a really good time!  Our daughter drove conservatively while our son was quite daring, leaving the ground over jumps several times. 

As I mentioned earlier, we were in the town of Salton City, CA.  The city is interesting because dozens of roads were built and paved in anticipation of houses that were never built.  Compare the map view and satellite view in Google Maps to see what I mean.   After we handed in our ATVs, we drove down to the shore of the Salton Sea, a massive ecological disaster that began with the inadvertent creation of California’s largest inland lake in the early 1900s.  Initially a desert paradise, Salton Sea’s salinity continued to rise as the lake shrank until in became the stinking, lethally salty body of water it is today.  There are many abandoned hotels around the lake as well as other artifacts of happier times in this area.  The lake’s transformation is the reason for the fully paved but sparsely occupied streets of Salton City.  We drove through block after block of signed city streets without a single house on them.

At first, the lake looks fine. if you can ignore the smell:

Walking out towards the shore, we encountered the victims of the lake’s ever increasing salinity:

There were many migratory birds to be seen, but otherwise it’s a sad mess.

With night approaching, we headed back to our RV on BLM land.  We’re exhausted, and I suspect everyone will go to bed early today.

Hooray, 100 days on the road!  We parked last night in a more open location on BLM land, and I positioned the RV so the Pallo Verde tree provided shade, but not so much that it cast a shadow over the solar panels.  It turned out to be significantly cooler today, only getting up to 76.  It was a beautiful day!

Since Shabbos starts at 4:30ish, homeschooling took up most of our day.  One of our son’s classes is microcontroller programming, and today we took a break from the textbook we’re using to build a thermostat for the 12 volt bathroom exhaust fan.  The fan cools the RV nicely, but leaving it on overnight uses up quite a bit of battery power, so we used an off the shelf thermostat as an input to the Arduino, which then uses a relay to turn the fan on and off, so when the cabin temperature falls below 70, the fan will turn off.  Here we are working on it, doesn’t he look excited?  He did both the wiring and the programming:

Here’s our daughter working on her math.  We later did our class on Scratch programming, and she worked on using events and messaging to allow sprites to interact with one another.

Just another day in our little homeschool!

I spent most of this morning in the Lowe’s parking lot reinforcing the broken bike rack strut.  I’m glad I brought my angle grinder and all the other tools that made the fix possible!

On our way east, we passed the massive windmill field west of Palm Springs:

We got off the freeway at sunset and settled in to a lovely patch of BLM land just south of Joshua Tree National Park.  Trish said “Try to get WiFi”, which of course is ridiculous since we’re in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine my surprise when we pulled in WiFi from almost 5 miles away!  See the distance field below:

I confirmed the distance using Google Maps:

It’s a somewhat academic victory since the bandwidth is so minimal that it’s pretty much useless, especially since I’m getting 3 Mbps on 4G, but still, it’s amazing that I can connect to a Wireless Access Point that’s 2 hours away on foot!

Celebrate this achievement by revisiting the WiFi antenna deployment video, won’t you?

Despite it being dark when we got here, it was only 6pm and the moon was up, so we decided to sit outside and chat as the night cooled, and then go for a moonlit walk.  Trish and I are both thrilled to be back in the middle of nowhere.  In the distance, we can see the nocturnal denizens of the interstate plod along.  It’s quiet here, and the air is crisp and clean.

  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.