Along for the Ride

During my ride to Antofagasta, I made a list of things that caught my attention...

1. A business called Frenos Daytona 500 (A brake repair shop)

2. Not one but several mattress repair shops. Who knew it was an industry?

3. Women´s pick-up soccer played in a field along the highway

4. The trees with branches and leaves all headed in one direction because of the wind. An arboreal comb over!

5. The need to report name, ID number, and emergency phone contact to the assistent on the bus...just in case.

6. The positively mauve colored sunset the first night on the bus. No other word for the color...I have a theory about that, but don´t know anyone to ask...and my first attempt at explaining the idea in Spanish tanked...no wonder, really, because it has to do with the curvature of the earth and topography and latitude. Will work on that.

7. The periodic roadside shrines--not all of which are for people who died in accidents. Some are just little shrines. None bigger than a doghouse, most decorated with shiny things and lots of what I will call religious articles. Beads, bitty statues, medals, etc. CDs are a popular choice for decorating, too. Reflective.

8. Periodic expanses of white salt deposits

9. Periodic small hills of oxidized copper dust

10. Wind farms with huge turbines in the middle of lots of nothing else. What a perfect place! I wonder,though, how they tap into the energy produced? And where-how is it stored?

11. Why is there the need for a curve in the middle of the desert? It is nothing more than a bump out on a straight line.

12. I saw one enclosure...in the middle of seemingly nothing else. No structure, no people, no worn path or road, no vehicles...just a cement walled square.

13. There is nothing boring about this ride. It is long and it is fascinating. God is so creative! And so vast and, well, powerful, but not in a wielding sort of way. More in a grand, sweeping, awesome, sort of way...

Between the desert and Haiti, it was a week of seeing forces of nature loosed and active, the whim and caprice and devastation.