This section of the trip was the longest but we concentrated on moving East always. We said we were "smelling the barn" ie we knew the trip was almost over and we were looking forward to not moving.
The general drift of our trip was as follows.
San Francisco to Fresno to work on the vans squeaky pop top at Sportsmobile. We spent the night in Fresno (not to memorable) and then left the next day and climbed North to Yosemite Valley which, as you can see from the map, is not to far away.
I put together a little blog with some of ours on it. I wanted to do it while travelling but that proved impossible. There is precious little 3G much less internet once you are out of the cities out west.
Did I tell you
Yosemite got snow across the Tioga Pass while we were there so we had to head south back through Fresno, on 99 to Bakersfield where we took 178 along the Kern River named for the surveyor that did the work. 178 is also called the Kern Canyon Road and goes past the famous Rio Bravo. and then along the Nevada across out across the Sierras spending the night at Lake Isabella in the Sequoia National Forest. This is a famous windsurfing spot that get's lots of wind. No windsurfing this time as it was freezing cold and we arrived late to see little wind. That night the wind really came up and it blew the town's cell towers down? The next day the grocery store had to process the credit cards by hand as the towers also serviced the land lines. Luckily we had camped right up against the dam so we were sheltered.
The next day we joined 395 at the famous China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station and headed north into Death Valley. Death Valley was really spectacular. It is 3,000 square miles in area and is the largest National Park.
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Las Vegas
Grand Canyon
Flagstaff
Sedona
Phoenix
Excerpt from my log.
November 7, 2010
Today we woke up in a rather sketchy rest area, an official New Mexico info spot in a town called Lordsburg. It is cheek to jowl with a thrice failed ghost town called Shakespeare. Apparently it was a diamond scam and then a failed silver mine. Now it is just plain rotting except for a local rancher who took it under his wing. You may remember Lordsburg as the final destination in the John Wayne film "Stagecoach"
We drove hard all day on route 10 across New Mexico to get to Marfa Texas, pop. 2000, for lunch. Being Sunday this out of the way spot is also a failed copper mining town. It had on offer only a DQ. Nice town with lots of galleries on the East side but we moved on to Alpine which has a local paper called the Avalanche. It’s bigger, about 5,500 residents, most of them are Hispanic where Marfa had mostly whites and artistically inclined hippies and new agers. Just outside of Marfa was a marker for Presidio and a claim to it being the oldest town in the USA. Not much to show for itself now at that site at least.
We had a quick lunch at the local Sonic Drive in and then discovered that the best food and deals in town was at Strips, a 12 pump mini-mart right in the center between 67 and 90. $3.99 for a full meal. We gassed up and headed south on 118 towards Big Bend National Park. We passed another “almost” ghost town called Valentine and then a really sorry spot called Lobos. If you want to own your own town those are likely candidates.
We got to Big Bend after passing only 4 cars on the 80 mile drive down 118. We watched a beautiful sunset at Sostal Point overlooking Mexico and the Rio Grande. Now we are camped at the Cottonwood campground under, you guessed it, Cottownwoods. There’s a rowdy group of kids and group campers at one of the end of the camp. They remind me of the group at Lake Mead where at least five families were all camping together. These spots would be more fun with a gang, that’s for sure.
Tonight we have chicken and salad again. Same as last night but I will see what I can do to spice it up.
Big Bend National Park
Corpus Christi
Austin
Houston
and then Route 10 with the hammer down past Mobile, Fayetveille, Baton Rouge, Pensacola, Gainesville, Orlando and finally Delray Beach.
I hope that you get a chance to travel too and that your journies always find yo safely home.
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