Of all the places I've traveled, the Salton Sea has to be one of the strangest. It's literally in the middle of nowhere, with huge sand dunes to the southeast, snow-capped mountains (in the winter) to the west, and Palm Springs way to the north. It's a lake in the middle of the desert. And it stinks...of algae and farming run-off and the resulting fish kills they produce.

Salton City, on the shores of the lake, is a town right out of an X-Files episode...every time I'm there, I expect to see Mulder and Scully pull up next to me at the convenience store. Empty houses line the remote roads, looking like their inhabitants were collected by aliens only moments before. The one gas station in town closes at 4 p.m., and you'd better have cash because they don't accept credit cards. Intersections with 4-way stops that never have more than one car approach at a time (or perhaps all day). A place created to be a bustling lakeside resort that never was with residents looking weary of waiting for their ship to come in.

But it's a haunting place, too. Because of its remoteness, and no doubt its smell, there aren't many people around. It's one place in Southern California you can actually have some breathing room, if you can stand to breathe, that is. But you can hear the wind blow and the calls of migrating water fowl. You can walk the shoreline for miles, each step crunching crusty barnacles and fish bones, and never meet a soul. You can stop and think for a moment or an hour or a day, and no one interrupts your thoughts. It's one of my favorite places.

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