Road trip to Calexico Part 1: the Salton Sea

A while ago I decided that we should apply for global entry cards mainly because I fail the passport scan every time I came into the country.  The process is pretty simple and in addition to passing easily through passport control it provides TSA pre-check.  We filled out our forms online, paid our money and then waited to be approved for a personal interview. The interview itself is short and simple, but it isn't given at our local airport, so that meant we would have some inconvenience traveling to a larger airport, but there are several airport that we would be driving near in our travels this fall, so I thought it wouldn't be a problem.  Unfortunately all the airports that we would be near had a waiting list of about six months for an interview.  The exception being the Calexico, CA point of entry where interviews were immediately available.  I managed to convince Calvin that we needed to take a little detour on our drive home from the bike trip to Calexico.  So we finished the bike ride in Santa Barbara Sunday afternoon and then drove to Desert Palms to spend the night.  I liked the look of Desert Palms.  It was 102 degrees at 8:00 in the evening, but the mountains around reminded me of Tucson and it felt familiar.  The next morning we drove to Calexico for our interviews, passed with flying colors, and headed home.  On the way we stopped at the Salton Sea. 

The Salton Sea looks pretty good from a distance, but up close it is a little less desirable.  The water is pretty brackish and there are dead fish all along the shoreline.  The fact that the temperature was well above 100 degrees did not add to its desirability. It is, however, a nice backdrop for photographs.

We went on to main visitor center where I discovered petroglyphs.  There is more to see in this desert part of California than I thought. You can see by looking at the parking lot that this isn't high season at the Salton Sea.

 There is a small visitor center but it was only open on the weekend. We had the beach pretty much to ourselves too. A good year long flood might help rejuvenate the tourist industry here.