(The blogging is slow going because I don't want the trip to end for a second time, but I'm trying to get these last couple of days blogged. Since it's almost 6 months later and now in the dead of winter, it's fun to blog about hot sunny days, though, so here goes...)

Remember, when I last blogged, I mentioned how dark the campground was when he'd set up and how far away the bathrooms were? This is what I work up to discover: we'd camped directly across the road from one.

We hadn't wanted to hang out on the mountain because we hadn't eaten dinner the night before and we were really hungry for breakfast. So we packed up pretty quickly. Here's a view of the mostly packed site with it's various levels we'd navigated to set up the night before.

We were at about 8,000' elevation so we got out our sweatshirts for the first time and enjoyed the tall mountain views. We seemed to be about halfway up Mt. Whitney but there were also other tall hills around so it was kind of like being in a crater. After so much open desert sky, waking up to this was enough to take our breath away.

We'd loaded our snackage bin in the bear box (it's actually illegal to leave food in your car at this campground. Not just a bad idea, illegal. Which I suppose means that you might not only get your car destroyed by a bear you'll get fined for it as well) so as soon as it was empty my little bears decided to take it literally and act like bears in a box.

Then we slowly cruised our way out of the campground, barely 10 hours after we'd cruised in.

More stuff we'd missed on the way in, due to it being really, really dark.

And then we broke from the trees and saw this.

Looking back from where we'd just been:

Doesn't this view deserve a panorama shot?

And then, maybe one more?

As we came down from the mountain we entered a place called the Alabama Hills, which is famous(?) for the rock formations. We knew of one that we needed to get a photo of that gets repainted and you never know what it will look like when you get there. On July 19th, 2013, it looked like this:

The cafe we had breakfast at had paintings on the walls that showed other rocks and what they were named after, a football player, an alien, and other odd people and places. Some looked quite obvious and others were a bit more vague, but I enjoyed the use of imagination. I only got a few shots of the rocks and didn't take the tour to see the ones with names, but you can see where a field of rocks like this would spark some crazy ideas.

The cafe was the most expensive meal of the trip (at least that I had to pay for). Our breakfast plus 2 giant cinnamon rolls to go was almost $40. That includes Quin getting a kid's meal and then eating off Kendrah's and my plates as well. It was tasty, but slow and expensive, more of a place to hang out than eat and run. There were a few groups of rock climbers getting ready to do their thing and some locals just watching the ebb and flow of humanity. I was impatient to keep moving as we had some driving to do since I was planning on arriving at my brother's house before it got too late so I wasn't an inconsiderate guest (um, last time I visited them I arrived after midnight and didn't want a repeat performance).

With breakfast out of the way we made our way out of town, stopping at a mine shaft. I suspect it's a movie prop and not a real one, but it had a cache in it so we went there.

The rest of the day -- including Yosemite -- will have to wait for another post.