Camping, Princess Style

[Porthos]

What is a rain shadow?

 

I'm 6 weeks out from driving up that same highway. 

[Smithy]

1 hour ago, Porthos said:

What is a rain shadow?

 

I'm 6 weeks out from driving up that same highway. 

 

It is always, always, always drier downwind of a mountain range than upwind, where "downwind" indicates the usual wind patterns. At our latitudes the winds are "prevailing westerlies" so the western sides of mountain ranges are wetter than the eastern sides. The mountains wring moisture out of the atmosphere as the wind blows up and over the mountains. Death Valley is especially dry because it's separated from (and downwind of) the Pacific Ocean by at least 3 large mountain ranges. Eastern Washington and Oregon are much drier than their western sides for the same reason. The drier region downwind of the mountain range is its rain shadow.

 

Since you're coming up this highway, I very much hope you take time to stop and visit Manzanar if you haven't done so before.

 

We've been touring, and I'm learning that I can do at most 2 of these 3 things at once: cook, visit, write. We've been doing a lot of touring and cooking (and eating), but the writing about it will have to wait. I will say, however, that I finally got around to my first attempt at duplicating the Celestial Sauce from Cafe Luna. Pretty good stuff. I'll write more about it later.

 

The ingredients -- well, most of them anyway:

 

 

And the final sauce:

 

 

Texture about right. Flavor quite good. We kept wondering what could be done to improve it, and coming up blank while we kept dipping our bread into it. The fireplace burgers afterward were anticlimactic.

 

[Duvel]

As a non-native speaker of English this label confuses me …

 

 

Either this means something entirely different or you chose a rather unexciting product. 

 

No “succulent anchovies” or “delectable anchovies” available ?!

[chromedome]

7 hours ago, liuzhou said:

Particularly useful when giving hour long lectures. Worked better than some of the lectures I suffered through as an undergraduate where some dozy professor read out the same lecture he'd been reading out every year for the last 40. One rather famous prof managed to fall asleep in the middle of his own lecture.

I've run across the phrase "collegiate drones" in a novel, meaning young, idle college men loafing through their studies while trying to score with girls. For me it immediately brought to mind one specific prof I had, compared to whom Ben Stein's droning teacher from "Ferris Bueller" sounded like Robin Williams on a cocaine jag.

 

Oddly he was very good 1-on-1, and I did end up learning a lot from him, but at the front of a lecture hall he was spectacularly dull.