Over the weekend, seven of my friends and I made the 432 mile drive to Las Vegas, Nevada to celebrate all of our 21st birthdays. As I watched the thermometer in my car flirt with three digit temperatures, I thought back to the readings in "Land of Little Rain." Before this weekend I had had little experience in the desert. The only images I had where those I had seen on T.V. on the Discovery channel.
The landscape laid out before me was much different than I had pictured. There was much more plant life than I had expected. Deserts to me were supposed to look like the vast sand dunes like those in the movie Aladin. I suppose Disney movies are not the best resource to base my impressions on.
As we drove on the two lane highway through the heat, I imagined what it must have looked like to those traveling across the country in their covered wagons; no highway, no telephone lines and no reststops. With just the tiny, ankle-high shrubs there was no excape from the blazing heat radiating down from the sky. (At that moment I was thankful for the air conditioning technology pumping refreshingly cool air into my car.)
My mind then wandered to the kinds of wildlife that resides in these conditions and how well adapted they must be to the extreme lack of moisture in their surroundings. (Again I am thankful for the last gas station we stopped at where I purchased a liter of cold, bottled Aquafina water.) Part of me desired to pull off to the side of the road just to get a better look at what surrounded me, but I felt others in my car may not appreciate the stop as much as I would.
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