Scenery and flowers from Sunday's field trip

I'm sure glad we went out to the desert on Sunday It was about 83 degrees and very little wind. Yesterday it was 88 here, by Wednesday it will be 68! And today in the low 80's but with sustained winds between 25 and 35 with gusts up to 65. I imagine there will be some damage and power outages around town. Hope it doesn't pick us up and blow us into the Wetlands. 
I was on the phone with Microsoft for well over an hour trying to get my Streets and Trips reloaded in my laptop. Still not working, tech told me something wasn't working at their end and I should call back later. So will give it one more try today. GRRR...
Fixed another dinner last night - this is getting to be a habit. Told Bill not to get used to it.
If you don't like the desert or pictures of flowers you might not like this blog today. I'm continuing with our Sunday drive.
The last blog ended when we were in the parking lot lower right of picture. Now we were up at a look out point - look out there are a lot of pictures!

If you click on this one, well actually all of them, they might get bigger to see. I guess I was wrong calling this the Colorado River - I think it is Lake Mojave. Which is part of the river.

 Looking kind of north up river.

 Just another pano shot.

 A closer look at he pretty yellow flowers. 

 Just liked the way this picture looked.

A blooming cactus. Saw several of them when we were driving but couldn't get a good picture of any of them. So glad this one was right here.   

 More pretty flowers.

Don't know what these guys are but they were butting heads. Weird to watch. Just now thinking "Why didn't I take a movie?"

 Another just like the picture. I took over 260 photos that day, so consider yourself lucky I'm only posting a few.

 Strange hole in rock, about the size of my fist, didn't look in it or stick my hand in it. Just took the picture. 

 A great big piece of gold and silver baring rock. The mica made it look like it was sprinkled with silver dust.

 But it doesn't show up very good in the photo. 

 Another shot of the river/lake. 

 Heading back on the road towards the I-95 

 Interesting scenery all the way.

 Fields and fields of Cholla cacti - mean little suckers. 

Cholla is a jointed cactus in the Opuntia family, which includes prickly pears. The plant has wicked spines with a nasty habit of getting stuck in skin. The painful barbs are covered in a paper-like sheath. Don't get too close to them. 

More purple flowers. 

 And now some orange ones. 

About five miles inland from the river/lake we began seeing buildings. Hummmm

So I will end this part of our field trip here. Stay tuned for travel to the past. 
Oh - I did not miss the race on Sunday - in fact we got home in time to see the very end of it. Where the #18 WON the race. I watched the whole race later off the DVD - how did we manage without one for so many years?
Boy the wind is picking up already. The awnings over the windows are shuddering! 
I was going to try out my new Bissell multi-surface scrubber/vacuum on the RV's area rugs today. But I want to do it on the patio. If I take them outside now they will be like Ali Baba's flying carpet. Gone.
If you didn't see the first part of our field trip just scroll down.