El Centro, CA

Sunrise 

We were greeted by a beautiful sunrise this morning.  A rare thing here, as there are not often clouds around.  Then we went into the Casino that owns the parking lot we had been staying in the last two nights.  We had not been in there before.  It's a small one, and smokey.  I did put $1 into a penny slot machine and lost it all. Oh well, we did get complimentary coffee and Pepsi, so wasn't a total loss.

Then we packed up and headed west on I-8 towards San Diego.  About a mile in to California is an Agriculture Border Inspection station.  All traffic stops.  They are trying to protect their state from invasive insects.  They asked us where we were coming from and if we had any citrus fruits, which we did not.

California Border Protection Station

Shortly after that was a small Border Patrol station (sorry no pic) with a working dog sniffing the vehicles.  They only thing they asked us was how many people were in the vehicle, and waved us on.

We drove through the dunes area again, on our way west.

Imperial Sand Dunes

It was only about 6 or 7 miles and the dunes were gone.  On the other side we found more vegetable fields. They were hard at work picking here too.

California Veggie Pickers

About the time we got to the town of El Centro, about half way to San Diego, the wind picked up a lot!  It was gusting up to 50 mph and pushing us around and blowing sand messing with the visibility, so we found a Walmart here and hunkered down for the rest of the day.  This gave us an opportunity to do some shopping anyway.