God is Love and colorful too...

Last Thursday we took my niece and nephew on a day long outing. We went to the desert. The main goal was to see Salvation Mountain and Slab City. (also check here) The drive to these destinations was about 2 1/2 hours. It was certainly a sight to behold! The weather was gorgeous (75-80°) not bad considering it's the desert! Summer temps range closer to 120°. After running rampant around the trash heap art work and then driving through slab city(sorry, I didn't take any pics of slab city) we decided to see how close we were to the Salton Sea. (hear hear to iphones!!!) Turns out we were very close. We were on the backside far corner. So instead of turning around to head home we drove all the way around the lake. It's huge and took us very close to Palm Springs. Not exactly towards home!!! As we got closer to finishing our turn around the lake we decided to cut through the desert(meaning we didn't take the freeway but instead used the VERY curvy back roads) and head up into San Diego County's local mountains. Destination...Julian! By this time it was dinner time so we stopped to eat(no apple pies were harmed eaten on this trip into Julian). Finally, we headed home. What should have been a half day outing ended up taking us 10 hours. It was a fun picture taking trip! The proof of the pudding is in the eating...(which is the correct way of saying the more popular phrase: the proof is in the pudding...which means: have a gander at my photo's would ya!)

The kids loved climbing around this huge heap.

Apparently, it's a work in progress.

You could even walk through it. The canopy of twisted painted tree limbs was crazy. Very colorful.

Photo op...

A boy will climb on anything...even a wall with strange footholds. (yeah, he only got about a foot off the ground by himself)

This tractor was one of my favorite things to see.

Here's a wide shot of Salvation Mountain.

Finally to the Salton Sea.

There were dead fish carcases everywhere on the shoreline. Kinda gross but I'll photograph just about anything.

 Good gracious...when did Bradsen get so grown up on me?

On my last scavenger hunt I posted a pic of a yucca flower getting ready to bloom. This is from the same stalk just lower down.

The flower that blooms out of a Yucca is really tall. I stood under it and shot up to get that gorgeous blue back drop.

This is a Yucca flower that has had it's fun in the sun!

 Lake Cuyamaca up in the mountains at sunset. Driving through the mountains at sunset is the best time. We saw a huge herd of deer. About 12-15 were grazing in a meadow. We stopped to watch them and I even took pics. They didn't really turn out. Sunset is also a bad time of day to shoot small objects that are very far away. I also saw a couple of wild turkeys too.