Down On The Border Mexico is only a few miles away, the weather last night was sweltering, still in the mid 70's close to midnight, Wednesday has dawned sunny but very windy indeed. A lot of the roads around here have large signs proclaiming "Warning : blowing dust area", we could be in for an interesting day's travel then. When we were at the desert museum, one of the staff said that Arizona is removing groundwater five times faster than rain falls, so for each million gallons that fall, five million gallons are used, this is surely leading to some kind of environmental disaster in the not too distant future. On the drive here you pass through hundreds of miles of scrub and cactus spotted hills, the rivers and washes contain nothing but sun baked stones, water seems only a distant memory, and then, whoosh, everything turns green. "Welcome to Green Hills Golf Course", way out here, or suddenly there are vast green fields being irrigated by enormous rolling sprayers, or fattening farms containing tens of thousands of cattle (which you can usually smell from miles away). It seems insane to have this sort of false greenery in what is a desert area. How are these dry southern states going to cope ? Thanksgiving is also approaching rapidly. This is the celebration enjoyed by many Americans to remember the generosity of the native people towards the first settlers who were slowley starving to death. The Indians brought them food and sustenance, in return the settlers stole their country, nice exchange. To be serious though, the native American tribes lived in tune with the land, they hunted and grew what they could and moved on to wetter parts if drought struck them. There are so many more people now though, chewing and drinking their way through the area's natural resources. This is fairly similar to what we saw on Spain's 'Golf Coast', golf courses, hotels, restaurants and their supporting industries springing up in areas which are naturally unsuitable for them. We plan on moving half way to Lake Havasu today, but first we might try and get a new sat nav, the one that came with the car dies yesterday. It's easy enough navigating between cities but I must admit the sat nav is a blessing when you're in an unfamiiar town.