> At the
>Arizona-California border, there were two things of note: a California
>Department of Food and Agriculture checkpoint where I was literally
>asked whether I had any
>fruit to declare,

Heh! Yeah, that's a pretty amusing checkpoint. Deeply srs bzns, of course, given the agricultural community in CA and the relative lack of citrus pests, but still pretty hilarious.

>So I did - there's not a lot else to do on I-40 between Needles and
>Barstow (as in "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the
>desert when the drugs began to take hold") -

Oh, dear me. Barstow. What a HOLE that place is.

So I was on a contract upgrading systems for the Army Corps, along with several other people. Our project manager--fellow by the name of Kendall, who was from Back East somewhere and had never been to California--was very proud of having rented a Prius, and very proud of having brought a satnav system.

He was so very chuffed over this satnav system that he'd engage it for any trip, even those of only 10 minutes' duration.

At this point in time, I did not own a smartphone or satnav, so my navigation was chiefly through these retro things called 'maps' and 'road signs'.

I'd just finished upgrading some systems at Edwards AFB along with one of my fellow contractors, and he'd just finished down at Palmdale--nearby enough, but far enough away that not seeing him on the road en-route to our next destination would not be unusual--and we agreed to meet up in Barstow, so as to go to Ft. Irwin the following morning.

I didn't think anything of it at the time--I popped out the north gate of Edwards, hopped on the freeway, and followed the signs for Barstow, getting there a few hours later in plenty of time to grab dinner at the (very sorry) sizzler in town there.

I did get rather concerned after a few more hours, so about 9 that night, I called up Kendall to ask if he'd gotten to town OK.

"We're almost there," he says, "we just passed Fresno."

Record scratch.

"You ...what?" I said, upon which I learned a few things:

1. There is more than one Barstow in California. The one he was going to was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barstow,_Fresno_County,_California

2. His satnav differentiated those Barstows by zip code, and ordered them naively.

3. Kendall was a very very funny guy on next to zero sleep. The guy who'd been following him the whole way--also from Back East--not so much.