A quirky little place called Gila Bend: hummingbird moth sighting!

The idea of seeing Lake Havasu City lost some of its shimmer after my unsuccessful attempt to get there, so I decided to head next to Gila Bend instead. I passed through this town earlier in my trip on the way between Yuma and Tucson, and I saw the signs for the Space Age motel and restaurant. I can't say this was a must-see place on my return trip, but it is conveniently located on the route that bypasses Phoenix and its traffic, and about the right amount of driving for the day. I got blown around a bit on I-10 on the way there, but it was just an annoyance, not too bad.

I decided to cash in a bunch of the $10 "gift cards" I've earned by staying at Best Western motels on this trip, and when I got here the clerk said she needed me to print them out for her. So I turned on their guest laptop in the lobby and waited while it installed a whole bunch of Windows updates.  While waiting for that to happen, I snapped this photo of the lobby ceiling:


That's a skylight in the middle. You can see the outside of the dome in another one of the photos below.

When I got to my room, I noticed that they have an unusual approach to security... each door has one of those vacant/occupied indicators typically found on restroom doors attached to the deadbolt. So the outside of the door advertises whether the deadbolt is engaged. 


Needless to say, I don't like this. So I took a backpack containing my valuables with me to dinner. 

Before going on, notice the glitter in the paint on the wall next to the door in the photo above. There is a lot of glitter in the paint on these buildings. You can see it glinting in the sun in this next photo too (if you click on it to view it full size):


I especially like the sun glinting off the restaurant sign in that shot. 

Here it is at sunset, all lit up and from a different angle:


You can see the dome clearly in that shot. And the stars in the restaurant sign light up at night! I do enjoy kitsch. 😄

And then there was my most favorite surprise about Gila Bend -- I got to see my first hummingbird moth in person! If you can, I recommend watching the video I took in full screen in HD. If you look really closely, you can see its tongue probing the flowers for nectar! https://youtu.be/EqD91BjbC8o  If you're intrigued, there are better hummingbird moth videos out there, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qm_L_HPdM They are such amazing creatures!

It's good to be reminded that I don't need to camp to have enjoyable interactions with nature.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apalachicola and Tupelo honey

Image
The fog thickened and the air cooled after I left Mexico Beach headed for Apalachicola, but soon after I arrived at this charming little town, the sky cleared and the sun came out to make a crisp, cool afternoon for taking a walk. The town Christmas tree was still on display down by the waterfront: I had started to think about Tupelo honey when I was considering staying overnight in Tupelo, Mississippi, back when I started planning this trip. Everything I knew about Tupelo honey is that there's an old song that talks about it. When I hunted up the youtube video for Tupelo Honey, the only part of it that sounded at all familiar was the hook.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klSQUdPTU0A  My guess is that it's one of those songs I only know about because of the ads for collections of hits that used to play frequently on TV when I was a teenager. They would play the hook of each song then move to the next one. It left me with the impression that I knew the songs when I'd
Read more

It's crop dusting season! (And apparently blue fruit loop season too)

Image
In Arkansas I saw two crop-dusters on the same day, both flying back and forth over the highway I was on. One passed no more than 20 feet in front of me, and maybe 10 feet over me. With those distances, it sure looks like the plane is headed straight for me... The second also was headed my direction but the timing was a little further off, or possibly just as close but behind me instead of passing right in front of me. The first one was an ultralight, and looked a lot like this (only bright yellow):  http://www.zenithair.com/stolch701/pic09/crop-spray.jpg and the second looked more like a regular small plane. When googling for crop dusting images, I was surprised how many of them were related to articles about crashes. Glad I didn't see that before I saw the planes headed toward me! I think that the people who stayed in my hotel room prior to me in Jonesboro, Arkansas were professional hotel housekeeping testers. The housekeeping staff at the hotel failed the test, but I passed!
Read more

Pipeline under construction: Seismic crew ahead

Image
Driving across Western Texas, I was reminded of how I used to think that someday I wanted to cross an ocean on a ship to get a sense of how big it actually is. Now I'm not so sure about that. Without landmarks to gauge speed by, how would I really get a sense of the ocean? I'd know how long it took, but would I really be able to perceive speed and distance? I have enough experience with flying to get a sense of how big an area is by how long it takes to fly over it in a commercial airplane, and I definitely get a sense of it by driving, but I'm not sure I could really grasp speed and distance if all I can see in every direction for days on end is ocean. Western Texas feels kind of like the ocean for a little while. I only drove about 3 hours to get from Pecos to San Angelo, but while I was in the desert with no towns in sight, it felt huge. I have a map of Texas that lives in my mind and I know how little of the state I actually saw compared to that whole map. What I did
Read more