Episode 2 : Are we nearly there yet?

Leaving Roslyn we carried on East on our route to find the allegedly barren wasteland that is Eastern Washington. Sure enough as soon as we'd cleared the cascade mountain range and its lower slopes, the trees thinned out and finally gave way to empty dry hot desert. It wasn't quite the saharas miles of rolling sands, or the flat dead earth of the middle east, but hot arid scrubland was everywhere. Nestled in vast gulleys and cracks in the ground were huge lakes.. some of the biggest I've seen in my life that stretch from horizon to horizon, loomed up on us as we drove towards Potholes Lakes and Moses City (our intended destinations).

The lake itself was a tremendous let down. It was very very hot, 100 degrees Fahrenheit in fact. The lake itself was vast, but had no scenery. No looming mountains in the distance, no pretty tree covered shorelines. Just a mass of scrubland with a vast body of water sitting in it. Also we'd chosen to pull over at a ghastly unpleasant camping community full of screaming children. It was all incredibly "council". So, we quickly left in favour of a more scenic detour home. Bream-boy had spotted some green bits on the map and navigated us there. Very surreal... the Americans refuse to be beaten by ANYTHING. Communism, the English language, the correct spelling of allumium quality tv that's advert free.. they've conquered them all. Now they can add desert to that as well.

Apparently Washington State is a bit rubbish for fresh food produce. The west is too mountainous and covered in forests to produce anything but fish and wine, the east is supposed to be desert and too dry... Anybody else would give up and import. Instead the local farmers have taken to irrigating on a grand scale. Huge centipede like machines stalk the fields spraying vast cloud creating mists over crops to give them some chance of surviving in the heat. Worryingly it seems to be working! It's very surreal driving through desert surrounded by fields of corn.... round fields at that.. check these satellite pics out. It's caused by the fact that the huge irrigation machines pivot from the centre and move around in a huge circle rather than backwards and forwards across a traditional field. Huge big long roads seem to travel for miles through these strange fields, and driving in a straight line for hours on end eventually gets quite difficult.

It's still pretty hard to imagine that in the time it takes you to drive from London to the Scottish border, you can go from deep mountain valleys, vast forests and soaring snow covered peaks, to arid desert wasteland, one hundred degree heat and cloudless blue blue skies. What a country... so unbelievably huge, and this is just within one state!