Driving From Los Angeles To Yucca Valley

We only had to drive once from Seth and Em's home to our apartment to know that if we were going to hire a car we were definitely going to need the GPS that we had just bought. The technical hitch - the USA maps refused to load and kept crashing my computer. It took a fraught six hours but I eventually worked it out and mention it here only because in my search for a solution I discovered that there were other people who had had the same problem with TomTom as me. I simply didn't have enough free hard drive space on my laptop to allow the maps to upload. We are traveling with plenty of portable hard drives so I did some spring cleaning and bobs your uncle.
So on with picking up a hire car. We were given a Toyota Yaris and as my mother and a couple of friends have told me they are roomy, comfortable and very fuel efficient. Very happy. Not so happy on my first go at driving on the right hand side of the road. Only one truly terrifying moment to report. In an indecisive moment on a downtown Los Angeles highway I couldn't make up my mind whether to peel off to the right or keep going straight. Sitting in the middle of a stripped piece of tarmac with streams of cars speeding on both sides of me and no room to accelerate so that I could merge got very tense. Mike just went very quiet and we did make it out of the city to visit Mike's other daughter Meg who lives in Yucca Valley, East of LA.

The drive is a steady climb towards the San Bernadino Mountains which still had a mantle of snow. Would have been really beautiful if you had been able to see them properly without the smog. Close to the top the smog starts to clear and the wind starts to blow. At the start of the pass that opens out into Yucca Valley proper there are wind turbines as far as the eyes can see. What a positive sight.