I waste a lot of time…

I spend an inordinate amount of time on journeys down the rabbit hole that is the internet. The other day, there was something I was seeing about flooding in California. I wrote about California the other day… the thing is that I’ve grown up on the East Coast and the East Coast is so very different than the Western states.

I live smack dab in the middle of MEGA CITY ONE… the eastern seaboard of the United States from just above Boston down through just south of Washington DC is one of the most densely packed places if not the most densely packed part of the United States. It’s funny because people who live in this part of the country, they really don’t have a great sense of scale… you can drive from New York to Boston it’s 300 miles but for a lot of people they think that is some GREAT DISTANCE and it really isn’t. Same thing with New York to Washington DC, you’ve even got Philadelphia and Baltimore along the way but people on the East Coast have this sense of it being some kind of incredible distance and when you compare it to the distances between places out on the West Coast there is just no comparison.

California from its southern to its northern tip is 800 miles!!!!

That is still a bigger distance than going from Boston to Washington DC which is only 439 miles but here on the east coast that would mean going through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland and are right up on the border of Virginia where California is ONE STATE comprising almost double the distance!

So, there I was looking around because I had been out to California both north and south and they were talking about flooding and I wanted to look at where that was. Then I started looking at home prices in those areas and then I got to looking around on the map.

The floods themselves are in Shasta county below Lake Shasta which is way in the northern part of the state but the odd thing here is just how varied California really is so that if you were to drive to the east of where these floods are you can reach desert in not too much time, an environment so dramatically different as to be on another planet.

So, I’m doing the down the rabbit hole thing and I’m thinking to myself, what does property out this way cost? I keep imagining a different life and part of that is looking at different places. What is the desert like? What’s out there? As I’m looking around on a satellite view of the area, I come across this weird thing… 

You can look around in street view and I see roads in the desert but street view isn’t on the and I see a military airport in the middle of nowhere but when I start to look around the area I see railroad lines and what looks like a big container terminal in the middle of the desert.

But it’s NOT a container terminal at all, it’s something entirely different and it’s just fascinating what it really is: