After my night at the truck stop the morning started cloudy. But then a real cold front came through, almost like back East. An RVer in the West doesn't get this pleasure very often.

We went out to explore the plain around our new boondocking site near Tonopah, AZ. The altitude was just over 1000 feet. Some of my plastic bottles, previously acclimatized to 10,000 feet, were flattened by the air pressure.

I was silently dreading returning to the creosote bush-dominated desert of lower Arizona. It certainly is a plain bush, and a terrain covered with one plant can be monotonous. But someone who has been hiking in thorn and sticker country recently can see creosote bush as a real blessing: it has no stickers or thorns!

Just a few feet from this creosote monotony you see the lush boscage of a dry wash. There are so few trees in the desert I really should know each one. I think there were ironwood and elephant trees in this wash.

This plain is covered with desert pavement, like at Quartzsite. But instead of sharing it with 500,000 Onan and Coleman generators, I am the only camper here. Desert pavement is a wonderful surface to camp or walk on, and it was adorned with glittering quartz rocks.

The first day in our new boondocking location we headed for the nearest saddle at sunset. We espied what first looked like a mosque near mountains in Morocco. Ahh, how I wanted to listen to Gabriel Yared's soundtrack for the "English Patient"!

On an earlier post I extolled the benefits of boondocking with the real economy, instead of the RV stereotype of camping with the tourist economy. But the photo above is actually a nuclear power plant. Perhaps I have taken this a step too far.

During the first blast of that cold front, tumbleweeds blew across the road. How marvelous and classic! Back in Colorado this past September I saw what looked like a model airplane flying about a hundred feet off the ground. But it was going too slow to be a model airplane. Yet its navigation seemed sentient.

Finally I got closer and saw that it was a plant similar to tumbleweed, at least aerodynamically. Apparently an afternoon thermal had grabbed it and lifted it from the pedestrian life of common plants. It had been spirited off to a higher plane of existence. No doubt the average plant looked enviously at it, gossiped about its pretensions, and felt satisfied to see it finally crash to the ground.