This post and the two that follow are catching up, from a long arduous trip that had nothing to do with my own issues in the immediate sense, and during which I had almost no web connectivity.

Saturday I woke in Yuma, a place that was mine against my will for a year. We made a point of making one last visit to the best places there. These include a major landmark coffeehouse downtown, a taco truck that’s more or less permanently parked, and a pizza place. We didn’t go to the riverwalk, because time was short. But now you know where to go when bouncing through, because you won’t be staying either.

First and foremost this’ll be because of the killer heat. But there are other reasons too. The water isn’t great. The continuous dust is made worse by constant literal crop dusting, right over the highways, with god knows what kind of crap dumped on you from above. When it does rain there is more wind than wet. In the summer, running the AC at minimal temperatures to sustain life will jack your electric bill up over four hundred a month.

The higher elevations consist of small hills without trees, but only a blasted moonscape and a thousand varieties of thornbush. Slightly more habitable climates are a minimum of a hundred miles off.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, and climate change is only making things worse.

For us, this datestamp is the end of it though. It served, when it needed to. We’re over that hurdle now.