Day 28 ( A travel day) Chula Vista, CA - Blythe, CA  223.5 miles, New Total = 5,676.9 miles
Restocked our provisions at the local Walmart before hitting the highway so our day's journey didn't really begin until about 10:00AM.  We weaved through the eastern suburbs of San Diego until we met up with I-8 Eastbound.  This route heads almost due East through the Mountains of the Cleveland National Forest. Although some of these mountains range up to over 7000', we never saw elevations in the passes we went through more than 4500'. Although we were passing through high hills and smaller mountains, we were in the desert, the "high" desert.  As we passed along the 100 + miles from San Diego to El Centro, the face of the desert changed many times.

From scrubby hillsides,

 to hills of pure rock piles,








and then as we moved down to the desert floor (at sea level and below) the terrain flattened out and the vegetation thinned

 until when we passed through the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation area it became just what the name implied "sand dunes".

After the dunes the land became scrub again and very rolling terrain. The road was marked with signs for "dips".  Sometimes there were 4 or 5 in a row, and some deep enough for a car to go out of sight.

Route 78 from El Centro to Blythe was basically a 100 mile wilderness.  Although we were in low desert, to our West and North were the Chocolate Mountains.

That's cotton!

Oh I almost forgot, in the middle of this wilderness was a very large (a couple of miles long), gold mine. Near the end of the route we came back into miles of agricultural land,











.......all irrigated by endless canals.

When we got to the campground we found out the source as we were camped on the banks of the Colorado River (the CA/AZ border).