Evening and rolling hills

After a good long drive through the desert I removed the pillow from my face and started enjoying the scenery again. As the sun moved lower in the sky and the light mercifully softened, we drove into the San Bernadino mountains. I was instantly reminded of a Frank Zappa song about San Ber'dino jail of course and watched the hills roll by with great interest.


They were very old and softly rounded granite mountains, mostly covered in yellowish grass and dotted with trees. It somehow had a Middle Earth feel to it, a very Tolkien like landscape.



It was very beautiful and as the sun set, it all became soft shadows and gold.


As darkness fell we pulled up at a shabby diner in a little town. Ivan has marked this diner on the map under the name Worst diner in the world! And indeed it was. Horrible food. Just horrible. The locals were friendly though and brought out maps and made suggestions for nice little towns to spend a day in on our way to San Fransisco.

I was a little nervous and thinking about Dave, the man I met in New Orleans. We had been writing to each other a lot after I left and well, I was feeling a rather large pack of bats fluttering around in my stomach a lot of the time. After midnight it would be his birthday and I wanted to do something nice. So after a good deal of brotherly encouragement I went outside the diner and called Coops Place back in NO, and asked the bartender Adam, to give Dave a bottle of whiskey from me. He was happy to help and so Dave received a bottle of birthday Jameson from a blushing and slightly nervous Dane in a dark parking lot outside The Worst Diner in the World in a flyspeck little town out west.