Live from the Days Inn in Barstow, California...

... this is a blog update. Your regularly scheduled blog entry will occur tomorrow morning.

Two things that we have forgotten to mention over the past couple of days.

First - Trains... up through most of New Mexico, we did not see any train traffic. In fact, most of the railways that we passed are for railroads that do not exist anymore.

However, in Arizona and California... we have seen enough train traffic to make up for the difference. Most of these have been very long trains with either the containers for tractor-trailers or the trailers themselves. We have seen this occur for both east & west-bound trains... and we could not tell if the containers/trailers were empty or not.

Our guess is that the trailers going east are coming from the California ports full of non-perishable goods. They are shipped via train to central locations where they are put on tractor-trailers, who take the goods the rest of the way. Empty containers are then loaded back on trains and sent to the ports to repeat the process. (Anyone know for sure?)

The other topic that we failed to mention is Wildlife. While we have mentioned Armadillos & Turtles in the past... the one animal that we have seen and failed to mention was prairie dogs. We saw a bunch of these yesterday in Arizona. At first, we thought they were squirrels or large chipmunks; however, we quickly realized what we were seeing. What was also interesting was that this sighting was only on a couple of miles of road... none before or since.

More tomorrow..

I&J