Month: December 2013

  • Epic Road Trip, day 18, part 3

    We played in Death Valley long enough to get more pictures than I care to count, including this one of the moon.

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    Which made me think we should get a move on, since we still had some distance to travel to get to our campsite. I’d considered camping in Death Valley but all the free campsites are first-come, first-served, and have little to no facilities. The ones I could have paid for were well off the road I wanted to take, and I also didn’t want to deal with the late-night heat inside a tent with the kids. But we had a few more dunes to scamper down before we left.

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    A dead stick in Death Valley.

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    And a boy playing dead. In the shade, which was the only place you could touch the sand for more than a moment before it started to hurt.

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    Then, a few more scenic shots — I loved this place.

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    Then it was time to head on back down the road with Unhappy Frog. We were heading for the hills!

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    But before we got there, the kids were entranced by the landscape. I think they were salt flats, and the ground glittered as the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky. I allowed them to get out and run as I drove slowly beside them on the road. They ran and danced and twirled and while the photo doesn’t do it justice, they felt like they were dancing on diamonds or among stars.

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    I wasn’t sure where the camp ground was, exactly and I was getting antsy cause I dislike trying to find my site in the dark, shining my headlights into other people’s sites while I search so I was trying to hurry. I got the kids in the car again and only paused to capture some photos of the sun setting.

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    I knew we wouldn’t make it so I stopped briefly for a geocache, but I couldn’t find it within a minute or so and gave up and kept going.

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    We’d started this day at about 8,500′ elevation. Over the course of the day we’d gone to about 900′, then up to 9,000′. Down, down to below sea level in the Valley, and then following GeePS to our camp near Lone Pine, CA, we went up and up and up, switchbacking our way up a mountain. I hadn’t realized Mt. Whitney was so….tall. Our campsite was a bit over halfway up the 14,000′ high mountain.

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    We had no idea how tall it was because by the time we were out of the Valley, it was dark. Blind-fold dark, since there are no street lights, reflective signs, traffic, or any sign of civilization. We zig zagged up and up and went round and round the campground till we found our site. It was pitch black so I did not get any pictures of my parking job, which was awkward at best. The site was on three levels, parking, picknicking, and sleeping, so we had to haul stuff down uneven rocky stairs and pitch the tent in the dark. Good thing we’re so good at it by now.

    What a long day with a lot of driving. The kids seemed dazed and confused and I knew it was bedtime. An hour after pulling in (and out, and back in, and out and back in again till I got it mostly right) we’d set up camp, walked a quarter mile to the bathrooms (well, pit toilet and no running water) and back, brushed our teeth and were in bed. I told the kids that if I have to get up in the night with anyone needing to pee, I was not walking that far and it would be the tree next to our tent that would be used. Course I was the only one that needed to. Ironic thing, 8 hours later when we woke up in the daylight, we saw a restroom about 50′ from our site. An hour later we’d broke camp, loaded the car and headed back down the mountain.

    But that’s a story for another day.

  • Epic Road Trip, day 18, part 2

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    Ah, Las Vegas. We drove through here to grab a couple of geocaches. This shoe photo qualified me for a virtual cache, but I also wanted to get a couple of traditionals, so we stopped here and found the container hidden in the statue’s left hind foot.

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    Then we drove to our first sighting of sand dunes. I figured we were getting close to Death Valley so I didn’t even slow down for this picture.

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    There’s a great deal of nothing in this part of Nevada. As far as the eye can see, there is nothing man-made but the road and an occasional strand of barbed wire strung up between metal posts that look like they’ve been there since the first World War. Still, the nothingness was interesting and different so I got another picture before driving on into more nothingness.

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    Oh, whoa. Ok, out in the middle of no where, and by that I mean, we’ve been driving for an hour and haven’t even seen another car, there is one building. It’s was HUGE. I think you could have fit 3 Costco warehouses inside it. And, well, we didn’t stop at it.

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    That wasn’t the kind of nothingness we wanted to see. We drove on. There is no one out here but us and the sun.

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    It was blistering hot.

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    And really, really lonely. We loved it. Just a straight road coming and going, and a lizard that would not stop talking. You also can see my murano glass pendant my friend sent me after her trip to Italy, the blue tag granting us access to Custer State Park in SD, and the orange tag allowing us into Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah. You can also see Jack, the Nuvi I borrowed so Kendrah could use it to guide us to wacky roadside attractions while I used GeePS to guide us to geocaches.

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    And of course, Unhappy Frog was with us. So… we weren’t really lonely inside the car, but outside it was desolate.

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    We arrived in Death Valley. No guard shack was there to check our National Parks permit and we just drove on in. Signs warned us to not use our A/C as we traversed the Valley so we rolled down the windows, blasted the stereo instead of the A/C and watched the scenery fly by. Which was almost as interesting as watching sweat droplets form on the backs of our hands. Weird! Weirder was when we stopped at a rest area. I was nervous about a pit toilet in the heat but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. While I waited my turn, I had to laugh at the pee chart they had posted in a kiosk outside the toilets.

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    Thankfully we were well hydrated (we went through between 3 and 5 gallons of drinks each day, I’ve never bought so much juice or so many bags of ice in my life) and after the break we jumped back in and continued on.

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    And on.

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    The sand dunes were gorgeous! Stopping at a parking area there was the first time we’d seen people for hours, and there were a lot of people here. By then, 30 people seemed like a lot. It wasn’t, like, Disneyland lot, but after being alone for so long, it seemed crowded.

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    The bits without people was absolutely gorgeous.

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    The kids, who thought 104 in Utah was too hot, ran up and down the dunes. I heard that it was about 120 degrees at the time. The sand that got between my feet and sandals was so hot I had to shake it out with each step. It felt like heaven there. I had a bottle of juice in one hand and my camera in the other as I wandered around capturing the antics of my kids.

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    Here’s Kendrah trying to block the sun.

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    People stopped to stare at the kids as they ran and flopped in the sand. No one else moved at more than a snail’s pace in that heat.

    It was fun and I have a few more pictures to share, but it will have to wait for another post.

  • Epic Road Trip, Day 18, part 1

    Today was the day to leave the comforts of Mom and Dad’s house and pool, and head off to see new places. Yes, there were a lot of rocks in the trunk of my car, thanks for asking.

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    There were a couple of virtual caches I wanted to stop at, but we didn’t have a lot of time for stops as this was one of our biggest driving days we had planned. We wanted to drive in Nevada and through Death Valley and make it to our camp site in Lone Pine, CA before nightfall. Dreaming. There was a lot to see, and our first stop was Ash Fork, AZ.

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    We found our caches and stopped at a little museum to use their restroom and browse for a few minutes. The lady there asked if we were going to be taking Route 66, since Ash Fork is a jumping on/off place for Route 66. I said, “No, we came all this way just to see Ash Fork.” She started dumbly at me for a moment and then found her voice to stutter, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say that before.”

    We continued on, but after a while took a side trip for another geocache and found ourselves on Route 66. It’s an interesting place we found ourselves.

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    Loved, loved, loved the marquee on this drive-in.

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    We drove on Route 66 for a time, past a brothel with scantily clad mannequins waving from a second floor balcony, then turned left to get back to the main road we’d been on. Along the way Kendrah yelled, “Stop and get a photo, Mom! That cloud makes that mountain look like an erupting volcano!” And, seriously, how can I resist something like that? I pulled over and got this shot.

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    We stopped at this sign for Chloride because there was a cache there. We didn’t go into town although it sounded interesting, but like I said, lotta road ahead of us.

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    Thankfully there was another cache up ahead — a girl’s gotta pee once in a while, you know? — so we stopped here. Unfortunately there were no restrooms, but there were cool bridges.

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    And grasshoppers the side of small birds! Can you see it? It’s well cammoed with the branch.

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    We took some time under the bridge….um, you know, looking around and …stuff…. and then had a bit of target practice. Under the bridge was a few degrees cooler, which makes a difference when it’s over 100. Wish I had a temperature gauge on this trip! Back in Colorado Springs, my sister had said that Death Valley might get closed down because the temps for this week were supposed to get over 130. We were semi-prepared with an alternate route.

    We shot our way out of the park with bridges and no rest rooms (well, sorta).

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    And made our way back to the road, feeling quite refreshed but ready for blasting A/C.

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    We made our way to Hoover Dam. What a site that is. We drove to the Nevada side, parked and walked up to the bridge overlooking the dam and walked back to Arizona, but we didn’t get all the way across before Kendrah decided she was having heat stroke and a dizzying case of vertigo. I took her picture anyway.

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    And made her wait while I looked down.

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    And get more photos of the dam. La la la la.

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    Fine, ok, let’s go back to the car. Oh, wait, one more photo.

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    The artsy railing and walkway were interesting. There were a lot of people sweating with us here and I had to wait for people to slowly move out of my way to get photos.

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    Then, from the comfort of the car’s A/C interior, we drove across the dam itself and got a few photos from a different perspective. In the first photo, you can see the bridge we’d been standing on earlier. Waaaaayyyyy up there.

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    We were too late to take a tour at the M&M factory (they close at noon) but we stopped for a wander through the cactus garden.

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    We went into the factory and approached a sample station. The woman behind the partition asked, “Milk, white or dark?” I said, “Oh, yes please!” She stood there for a moment just looking at me so I said, “Um, okay, uh, milk.” She handed me a sample that might have filled one M&M shell on a warm day and I thanked her and we moved on. Not impressed with the store offerings, I didn’t even buy a postcard, but we did get some photos outside.

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    Feeling pressed for time, we headed for another cache or two, but that will have to wait for part 2.