Thursday - Travelling to Kings River Bluegrass

On leaving Mojave, which is right on the Eastern side of the Mojave Desert, which is relatively flat, we immediately started to climb into the mountains around Tehachapi (the emphasis is: the 'ha', sound as in 'ha'ppy and the 'api', sound as in h'appy'). The road runs through a fairly narrow mountain pass, accompanied by a narrow gauge, but very busy, railroad (do not confuse narrow gauge with the small private railways in England and Wales, many railways in USA are narrow gauge, yet carry full size wagons, each wagon may be stacked with two freight containers. Their may be more than a hundred wagons in a train, being pulled by four or five big diesel locomotoves). To either side, towering above on the mountain tops are hundreds of wind turbines of all different sizes. In September the grass, which covers the mountains as far as you can see, are golden yellow colour, waiting for the rains to come in November, when they will turn green again.
After passing Tahachapi we started to drop down, as we cleared the mountains the colour of the landscape changed to green. As far as the eye could see there was a flat plain, which was covered with crops. This was the area simply called 'The Central Valley'. It was a desert until the water which flows from the Sierra Nevada was captured and used for irrigation, mkaing The Central Valley one of the most productiver agricultural areas on Earth. The valley is about the size of England,more than four hundred miles long and up to 250 miles wide, which is intensively agriculturalised. Hopefully we will be able to write more about this area of California later.
Driving North past Bakersfield we arrived just south of Fresno,at Sanger, where the Festival is held. We had opted to pay extra for an electric hookup as we thought (quite correctly) that it maybe hot and we would need our A/C.
Immediately on arrival several people came to greet us and help us to choose our site. We were invited to place our trailer right next to Rich, a banjo playing preacher from San Francisco, so we moved in and placed our trailer 'awning to awning' for protection from the sun.