SLO

We arrived in San Luis Obispo with a disagreement over its pronunciation and no real knowledge of what the area had to offer. What attracted us was its location, not far from the coast north of Santa Barbara, and the relative ease of being able to follow the Pacific Coast Highway [above] up to Big Sur or farther


But first, we're hungry and Debbie needs to shop.  We also thought it would be wise to find the area's Visitor's Center which is right downtown.  The kindly woman responded to Debbie's quesitons of what is there to do for a couple Michiganders in town for a short while, beginning with the SLO (as we learned everybody calls it) "Greek Festival".
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This apparently was a relatively big weekend deal for hundreds of people in this town with live music, Greek dancing, and Grecian themed trinket sales surrounding the eating tables set up near the two serving lines. We even entered the free raffle (hoping to find it would have more effect than to get our emails on the spam list).  
Oh, and we spent about as much money on less food than if we'd gone to a good restaurant: Orzo (cold pasta salad), some kind of cheesy dinner pastry (the name of which we forget), a gyro for John, and moussaka for Debbie. John had wanted the souvlaki, but they were out, until about 42 seconds after he left the other line with his gyro in his hands. Oh well. It was different and fun, like GR's Arts Festival food booths, but fewer. And we sort of felt the money might go to some good use locally. We don't mind voluntary, targeted sharing of our limited resources. It's the overweening thievery by government at all levels that really pisses us off.
{pause for deep calming breath...}
On the way out the door, John prevailed and Debbie's weakness for baklava was leveraged into six pieces! Dessert for three nights in a row (because Debbie doesn't allow for second desserts in one night!).


While in town we stumbled across an historic Mission left over from early California days –think Zorro. Among the interesting factoids we picked up there was the reason for the ten foot tall shepherd's crooks planted along the California highways. On each crook is a bell. These are waymarkers that memorialize the foot and horse navigation of El Camino Real, the Royal Road that ran from Mission to Mission along the state. As we recall several footnotes through our visit, the Friars –who thought they were doing God's Work-- were used to spread the Spanish dominion over the area. The Bells were a project of a history-struck rich lady more than a hundred years ago, and still exist today. Thank you California taxpayers. ...which we guess includes us temporarily.

Our explorations led us to drive across a big agricultural valley somewhere between Bakersfield and SLO.. Field after field of produce and fruit. We won't admit to how we know, but fresh-off-tree oranges are not better than store-bought at one unspecified location, hypothetically speaking, at least according to one of us who may not be compelled to testify against the other in a court of law.

John noticed mile after mile of wide open irrigation and water distribution ditches crossing miles after mile of irrigated hot, dry desert farms. So he googled evaporation data out of idle curiosity (what else is there to do in the passenger seat?) and found four presumed students at UC-Davis

who'd hypothesized, then claimed to have confirmed a significant daily water loss in the tens of thousands of gallons from the State Water Project canals. Their suggested remediation options included plastic covers and even flooding the ditches with floating plastic balls. Then they went, in John's opinion, wayyy too far in their paper by suggesting every ditch be covered by electricity producing “solar panels”. John finds the “paper” was more of a political argument in favor of pursuing this final option while off-handedly dismissing conventional means of power generation..

They justified the huge government (tax dollar) Expense for this relatively little*** power (private dollar) Return by comparing the value of power produced to the cost of the water lost (and ignoring that power production is not a government enterprise). They tossed in the generalized, unsubstantiated claim that the cost of solar panels will continue to decrease. The summary page of their study struck John as wishful because of the uncritical apples-to-oranges comparisons:  “benefits inherent in preventing water loss” in the same sentence that generally claimed an expected increase in population. The next sentence begins, “Considering climate change..” and claims “significant” temperature increases along with future “variable” rainfall.

The paper is four years old now and, despite this group's pie-in-the-sky, California's water continues to disappear into thin air (and into the grapes, nectarines and oranges that you eat!).  Maybe the UC-D kids leveraged themselves a grant and are even now getting around to a Pilot Project after setting up their own offices, assigning each of themselves a government owned-and-subsidized Prius, and etc.

Maybe somebody will simply cover the canals.

Or not.

Or...{continuing with fantasy theories} it's possible these four are not kids at all, but University officials hired to technobabble a "green" justification for the State to steal more public money for a private (power generating) industry.  Kinda like Michigan's Consumer's Energy plan to shut down all the coal and nuke plants while planting field after field of solar panels and wind turbines that, quite literally, nobody wants in his or her back yard with the end result of raising your cost and decreasing what you have to spend on your quality of life.

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You could google “power generation efficiencies” to discover that electric solar power is generally 15%, while coal/gas/nuclear plants are a bit less than three times more efficient. Somebody explain that to the politicians. Please! (and, back at home, to Consumers Energy)