7th April to 1st of May 2012.
The second part of our trip was to head east, towards as yet an unknown destination by the 1st of May. A very exciting prospect and one that has so far worked out very well for us on our travels so far.
Our first aim was to head towards Death Valley National Park. Just after leaving San Simons we climbed up the road through the mountains towards Pasa Robles. It was a glorious day again and we stopped on the top at a viewing point, looking over the Pacific Ocean for the last time on our tour, watching eagles swirling high above us looking for some unsuspecting prey.
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| View overlooking the pacific- Pueblo Robles Mountain |
We continued on the road towards Bakersfield and the surrounding landscape was full of wineries. The amazing thing we discovered that some of them had oil pumps within the middle of the vines which were still active. Lucky owners!
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| Winery with oil pump |
After the winery landscape, we had to then travel through miles and miles of fruit trees. The landscape started to get vey arid and highland landscape with little vegetation. We travelled a full day before reaching Mojave which was now in the desert. We stopped for one night as we planned to go to Death Valley as our next destination. The next day was a very interesting journey as the roads got quieter and quieter, in fact at one point we were by ourselves on the road for at least an hour, towards Ridgecrest,through Trona where we stopped at an Elk club for a coffee .We met an interesting volunteer who explained how basically the whole area is famous for its US missile production and testing .That was probably why there was not a bird animal or human in sight ! The temperatures slowly increased to 32 degrees which felt very hot inland at midday.
We reached a tourist spot called Death Valley Junction at lunch time, which was an ideal place to stop for lunch. We were quite amazed as there were loads of people, we wondered where they had all come from since we had not seen anything for miles. Situated there was one hotel and a RV park and restaurant all in the middle of a small desert area.
We stopped for about an hour at and then headed towards Death Valley where we were planning to stop for a night or two. The drive had fantastic views of sand dunes, colorful marbled rocks with mountains everywhere in the back ground. (The sort of place artists would wish to stop in order to paint award winning paintings of landscapes) We drove for about another hour before stopping off a place Badwater famous for being the lowest point below sea level at 194 feet and having the highest ever temperature recorded in the USA. We walked on the salt flats and looked around us at the valley sides -another amazing place, especially if you are into Geology.
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| Death Valley |
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| Mountains hat weere amazing = Death Valley National Park |
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Standing next to lots of sand dunes near Death Valley
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| Bad Waters |
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| Car temperature 37 degrees at 5pm in land- phew very hot1!!! |
We got back in the car and the temperature had reached 37 degrees Centigrade , so we continued our journey with our windows open . Even though we had been driving for a while and it had reached 5pm there was no choice but to keep going. Death Valley National Park is huge, one of the biggest in the USA and 45 minutes later the next place we could have stopped was called Soshane .We stopped for a drink but it had one hotel, and was very isolated. We both sat and looked at each other, it was quite amazing we were both thinking the same thing and said ; How far is it to Las Vegas? we checked it out and it was only 87 miles and would take about one and a half hours.( Why waste money staying in a one horse town when we could be in Vegas that night.?) Our mind was made up and that was our next destination.
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| Steve standing on the salt deposit on Bad Water |
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Hotel just outside Death Valley National Park
(This is where we made the decison to go to Las Vegas) |
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