Death Valley is Hot…I Guess

The Last Leg of the Road Trip

After hanging out in Reno for a good hour and a half, it was time to get out and continue driving. I was pretty happy to get out of Reno since traffic was a little bad and the sun was starting to set. Carson City was not far from Reno, and did not look that great when driving through it. I did not see any big reasons to stop and where so we drove straight through it in hopes of getting to Lake Tahoe before the sun set.

Lake Tahoe Is Amazing

Lake Tahoe is really cool to see. The lake comes out of nowhere as your driving through the mountains and reminds you of the ocean in a way. The coolest thing was hanging out on a cliff during the sunset and seeing all the different colors in the sky. Here is a picture I took with the moon off in the distance:

That is about all I saw of the lake because the sun sank pretty quickly. Plus we were in a hurry to get back in the car and find a place to sleep before it got completely dark outside.

Finding A Place To Crash

There were a few campsites along Lake Tahoe, but not of them looked to promising since there were all overloaded with people for Labor Day weekend. So I managed to drive longer than expected in hopes of finding a better place to sleep. This turned out to be a somewhat bad idea…

Once you get south of Lake Tahoe, there is not much for large cities. As we continues to move South, the cities on the map kept turning out to be less than 500 people, not too promising for finding a hotel after 10 PM. I was continuting to get more and more tired from driving, and I was starting to feel exhausted. Not the best feeling when you are driving over mountains in the middle of the night.

Bridgeport looked like the largest city nearby, so that was the new goal. Make it to there and stop driving for the night. What I was not expecting, was the drive I had to make to get to highway 395. Highway 89 goes up and over a mountain, and is known as Monitor Pass. What that means, is that I basically drove up and over an 8,000 ft mountain in the middle of the night. The road was curvy, rough, and hard to see at times. I was pretty much hullucinating from driving so much and I wanted nothing more to get to the bottom.

Luckily, we survived the whole escapade and made it to Bridgeport, only to find the one motel open was charging $140 a night for a room. Screw that! So instead, we pulled the car up between two semi’s in a parking lot and slept in the car. Now that is how you save money on vacations. Unfortunately I woke up and started my car, only to see a temperature of 26 degrees.

Death Valley At Last

After waking up in freezing weather, it was time to head to one of the warmest places in the country, Death Valley. After driving through more mountains and desert, we finally came up to this sign:

At first, Death Valley was nothing I was expecting. It reminded me a lot of Arizona, even Phoenix in some ways. It was warm, but not too bad. However, the road soon started declining down the side of the Valley and the temperature started to increase. The coolest part I saw of the park, was the dry lake at the bottom of the Valley. Here is a shot of me sitting on the bottom of the “lake”:

The ground was literally as hard as concrete, with small cracks everywhere. It was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. There was no vegetation in sight. The temperature was 101 degrees, which was actually cooler than it was in Phoenix that day. So in a way, Phoenix is a Death Valley of its own. Check out the rest of my pictures from Death Valley.

Home At Last

After Death Valley, it was off to Phoenix. The only thing interesting on the drive home was going through Las Vegas and getting stuck in rush hour. It reminded me a lot of driving on the I-10 in Phoenix.

Anyways, we made it home in one piece. I put over 2,000 miles on my car and saw more in one trip than I ever have before.

Tune in tomorrow for something new…

Posted on: September 11th, 2008

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