It's Tuesday- we must be in California

Well, here we are on the west coast again. We loaded yogurt on Friday night and we are in Barstow CA on Tuesday night. We had a pretty uneventful trip across- except for Sunday afternoon in Oklahoma where we encountered several bands of storm clouds that were potentially tornado-spawning. Here are two examples

Later we parked in E. Tulsa for the night and tuned into the local TV channel. Every commercial break was interrupted by thunderstorm and tornado warnings. Communities just to the west of Tulsa were warned to head to tornado shelters. Soon after, our location was hit by a very fierce T-storm with stunning lightning and torrential rains. We were fine in the truck.

These next pictures fall under the catagory of 'things you don't see every day'

Today we stopped at a rest area in the Arizona desert. It looks like your average rest area with restrooms and shaded picnic tables. But we loved the signs they had posted all around the edge of the pavement.

Here is a distant shot of Kurt standing by the sign

And here is a close up of the sign

It says "Poisonous snakes and insects inhabit the area"

The Poconos and beyond

We have been back on the east coast for two weeks. Our eastbound load was 7 shipments to go to 7 friendly hometown hardware stores. Five of our delivery addresses - in three states-were on Main street! We started in the Poconos, circled the Catskills and finished in the Berkshires. It was a very scenic trip. A highlight was getting to see spring arrive--When we started two weeks ago there were barely buds on the trees and now the hillsides are greening up. Here are some scenes from our travels

Here in the Pocono’s most of the trees were still just bare trunks except every now and then there was a blossoming tree in the under story. It was very pretty to see the lacy blossoms against the dark of the trunks


We traveled through the Delaware Water Gap- a national park along the Delaware river where it punches through the Pocono Mountains. I took this picture partly for the yellow forsythias- that I love and they were in bloom everywhere. Also for the huge clump of rhododendron beside it. Rhody's are the state flower of Washington - but clearly they thrive in other areas of the country as well.


OK, here we are getting up close and personal with some pretty old homes on some pretty narrow byways on the way to one of our deliveries.


Scharf Swamp. This a plot of land in the Poconos that happens to have recently been WON as a door prize at a land auction by our good friends in Washington, Bob and Laura Scharf. Since we were passing so close to it we got out of the truck and walked to the site. The 90x100 lot has a meandering drainage ditch running through it. Sorry Bob- looks like you won't be making much of a killing selling this beauty. :)


After making our 7 hardware deliveries we were sent to Atlanta. The route takes you by New York City. Since it was a Sunday we decided to take the close-to-the -city route through the Bronx and over the famous George Washington Bridge.


As you cross the bridge you can look down the Hudson River and see the skyline of NYC

New England back roads

After our trip to Georgia we were sent to Vermont and from there over to our yogurt factory in New Hampshire. There just aren't any freeways that go from VT to NH so we traveled a lovely country road- and as usual saw some interesting sights.

Here we are going through a quaint New England town- another main street excursion for us. I think this was Bennington NH. We could see that it is probably "ground zero" for the fall folliage season. Happily today was not too crowded for our big truck to come though.



Another town had this great monument to pioneer mothers- a baby in one arm and a rifle in the other.


It is never a good thing when you are driving a 13' 9" high vehicle and the sign says 9 foot high bridge ahead. Fortunately this covered bridge was on a side road.



Leave it to those crazy Vermonters to put cows on top of their farm stand.


As we came around a corner we saw a sign for 100 Mile View- so here it is.

Fire on the freeway

We happened upon this huge accident on Georgia this week. It probably occurred about 3 minutes before we passed it. Luckily for our travels, it was on the other side of the freeway and amazingly everyone got out safely. This is the worst accident we have passed this year.

Here is the first sight we had of the accident- the fire is just starting to get going.



As we got closer we could see that a tractor-trailer rig was on fire

Then we saw that a motor home and another semi were knocked into the median
Finally, as we passed alongside we noticed there was also a car involved- under the burning trailer. That really was upsetting so see- but later we found out that the car was being towed by the motor home so no one was in it at the time of the accident.

A rosy peach.......or?

We posted this picture of a giant peach last fall when we drove through South Carolina. This is the view you get when you are traveling northbound

On this trip we got the southbound view of the giant peach.
It gives you a wholly different look, doesn't it? We have heard it referred to as a "giant butt"- and you can see why!!